A Good SBOM is Hard to Find

The concept of a software bill of materials (SBOM) aims to provide consumers with information about the components inside a software, enabling better assessment of potential security issues. Justin Hutchings, Senior Director of Product Management at GitHub, emphasizes the importance of SBOMs and their potential to facilitate patching without relying solely on the vendor. He spoke with Alex Williams in this episode of The New Stack Makers.

Creating a comprehensive SBOM poses challenges. Each software package is unique, such as an Android application that combines the developer's code with numerous open-source dependencies obtained through Maven packages. The SBOM should ideally serve as a machine-readable inventory of all these dependencies, enabling developers to evaluate their security.

Hutchings notes that many SBOMs fall short in being fully machine-readable, and the vulnerability landscape is even more problematic. To achieve the standards Hutchings envisions, several actions are necessary. For instance, certain programming languages make it difficult to inspect build contents, while the lack of a centralized distribution point for dependencies in languages like C and C++ complicates the enumeration and standardization of machine-readable names and versions. Addressing these issues across the entire software supply chain is imperative.

SBOMs hold potential for enhancing software security, but the current state of implementation and machine-readability needs improvement, particularly concerning diverse programming languages and dependency management.

Learn more at thenewstack.io

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