SBOM Ouverture: What We Need and What We Have

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Abstract
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is an inventory of the software components used to build a product, which can help customers track security risks throughout the development lifecycle. The popularity of SBOMs grew in May 2021 when the White House issued an executive order to improve the security of the software supply chain and the transparency of the government’s software inventory. Although the growing interest in SBOM, many open challenges need to be addressed to help reduce exposure to cyber risks and enhance the security of software supply chains. To help the industry and research assemble the roadmap to achieve SBOM adoption in practice, in this paper, we analyze the challenges related to enabling technologies and the open issues that research must investigate. Furthermore, we perform a comparative analysis of the existing tools to generate SBOMs, demonstrating that the enabling technologies have not yet reached full automation and maturity.

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