When every line of code has the potential to be a vulnerability, SBOMs give defenders the additional insights they need to protect their software supply chain.
AppSec teams are in the eye of a software-defined storm. Everything as code — infrastructure, compliance, security, AI — is the new normal. At the same time, software release cycles have accelerated past a point where traditional security tools and approaches can keep pace. Factor in the reality that as much as 80% of the code involved comes from third-party sources, and it’s easy to understand why visibility is a challenge for many AppSec teams.
Software bill of materials (SBOM) tools help solve this problem. They’re like an “ingredients list” for each application in your environment, helping defenders maintain visibility and identify critical flaws, potential vulnerabilities, and other weaknesses in code. The insights gained help mitigate supply chain security risks, reducing the likelihood of vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks.
The role of SBOMs: why they’re important, what they do, how they help
Modern applications are a complex mix of third-party components, open-source software, and proprietary code – all with their own interconnections and dependencies. As software supply chains become an ever-expanding attack surface, AppSec teams must gain and maintain visibility into the development environment. That’s why the ability to understand and generate a software bill of materials has become so important: in a world where 91% of organizations have experienced at least one software supply chain security incident, SBOMs are a crucial component of every proactive security strategy.
The purpose of an SBOM is to detail all software components in an application, including source code, libraries, packages, and modules – along with their corresponding version numbers, licenses, and any other relevant metadata. AppSec teams can use these insights to identify and manage vulnerabilities specific to their organization’s software ecosystem and supply chain. It’s a massive task; to do this effectively, it’s best to use a comprehensive SBOM tool. And to help make sense of everything, there are standard approaches.
SBOM formats: choose your approach
SBOM formats are standardized structures for communicating information generated by the SBOM. The most widely used are:
CycloneDX: This specification was developed by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and is designed for automating SBOM generation and machine readability. It has an emphasis on supply chain component analysis.
SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange): Developed by the Linux Foundation, this is geared towards developing a standard language around SBOM data descriptions.
(A word on) Software Identification Tags (SWID): While these often come up in discussions around SBOM, it’s important to note that SWID is not an SBOM format. They provide identifying information for software components, such as version/creator. Useful as they are, SWID tags lack the comprehensive details of dependencies, vulnerabilities etc. that true SBOM formats provide. Best practice calls for an established SBOM format.
Pipeline Bill of Materials (PBOM): OX Security’s proprietary Pipeline Bill of Materials (PBOM) standard takes SBOM to the next level, providing a comprehensive list of software lineage, from the first line of code to release, while identifying threats.
In light of the rapidly expanding presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in software supply chains, we now have AI-BOMs to provide a comprehensive inventory of hardware, software, data, and pipeline components in AI systems. AI-BOMs address the growing concerns around the presence of vulnerabilities and malicious code within AI/ML libraries, many of which are moving out of the theoretical and into real-world attacks. This makes them a critical component of any modern supply chain risk management strategy.
Standards play a key role in compliance with multiple global compliance and regulatory mandates. For example, both CycloneDX and SPDX are approved by the U.S. government’s cybersecurity executive order – which is one of the reasons why SBOM management matters.
Securing the software supply chain: Compliance and regulations
As if the security payoff alone isn’t reason enough to adopt SBOM, there are other crucial drivers: SBOM generation became mandatory under U.S. Executive Order 14028 — Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, a rule issued in May 2021, the European Union Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), introduced in 2022, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Binding Operational Directive 23-01.
In addition, at the federal government level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP) organization, U.S. Department of Defense, (DOD), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have all issued guidance and strong recommendations for SBOM creation, and in some cases, require SBOMs for software suppliers.
Whatever the geography, the thinking behind these mandates is that SBOMs significantly improve organizations’ abilities to manage software supply chain risk. After all, if you don’t know what makes up your software, how can you be sure of your relative cyber risk? Let’s take a quick look at some of the other benefits of SBOM tools.
Getting the most out of SBOM tools
So you’ve got the data and you’re compliant with regulations for software safety and security. Some of the other ways that SBOM supports software security and mitigates the risk of supply chain attacks include:
Streamline vulnerability management: A key benefit of SBOM analysis tools is their capacity to enable rapid identification of known vulnerabilities, and how those vulnerabilities impact other parts of the software supply chain.
Enhance software supply chain security: SBOMs help mitigate supply chain security risk by providing comprehensive, detailed visibility into the components and dependencies of software.
Prioritization and patch management: Generated SBOMs are compared against databases of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs, including those on the National Vulnerability Database), so AppSec teams can score and prioritize threats based on their organization’s specific needs.
Security at every stage of the SDLC: Integration with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines makes it possible to generate SBOMs automatically with each software build. This drives enhanced security, transparency, and compliance at every stage of the SDLC.
Ensure compliance: SBOMs software inventory documentation doesn’t just enable vulnerability detection, it also provides insights into licensing for open-source components, ensuring all code is compliant. And, as we’ve seen, SBOMs also help organizations meet federal mandates, allowing their software to be used in government agency settings.
Barriers to SBOM adoption
As we’ve seen, Software Bills of Materials are a key component of effective software supply chain risk management. The benefits are clear, but barriers to SBOM adoption do exist – both technical and non-technical. For example, data normalization can be a challenge, particularly for organizations working at scale. Aligning multiple versions of the truth across formats from different vendors with a different approach to providing data for the same libraries or components can be a huge challenge.
Other organizations struggle to manage SBOMs across all supported versions of a given application, whether it’s proprietary software or open source — and into end-of-life / end-of-support. Inconsistencies here can lead to false positives or false negatives – both of which create additional workloads and confusion for security teams.
With this much complexity, choosing the right approach to implementing SBOM as part of an overall software supply chain security solution is crucial.
Implementing SBOMs: Steps to success
SBOMs are an effective building block in every supply chain security strategy. To help manage some of the challenges to adoption, here are some steps that organizations can take to ensure success:
Pick and stick: Make sure your primary SBOM format is standardized and aligns with your organization’s specific needs for security and compliance.
Automate and integrate with CI/CD pipelines: Integrating SBOM tools with
CI/CD pipelines enables you to generate SBOMs automatically with each software build. Automation takes the strain out of manual processing – and the errors that can accompany it.
Sign for more security: Signed SBOMs bring additional layers of security by preventing tampering and ensuring integrity.
Join the dots: Connect your SBOM tool/process to your vulnerability management tools (or better still, choose a platform that integrates all the tools you need) for comprehensive visibility, tracking, and management.
Bringing in the SBOM squad with OX
SBOMs generate the insights security and AppSec teams need to mitigate risks before they can be exploited, making them a powerful tool in support of any proactive security strategy.
Ox Security’s Active ASPM Platform includes not only an SBOM generator that creates an SBOM in minutes, but also an API BOM, SaaS BOM, and artifacts BOM, for full pipeline visibility. OX gives AppSec and DevOps teams the deep transparency they need, with seamless tracking for licenses, patch status, and dependencies, keeping software supply chain risks to a minimum.
SBOM can transform your organization’s security posture, but OX takes that to the next level with its proprietary PBOM standard. This pipeline bill of materials goes beyond a simple inventory of components, generating a dynamic list of everything a piece of software has gone through – from the first line of code all the way through to release.
Gain end-to-end SBOM security coverage for your organization, book your demo now!
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