After a couple of years in the software development space, I’m sure you, like me, have discovered that third-party softwares are vital to the development process. They simplify and speed up your work, enabling you to expand your horizons more than you may have realized when you started out.
However, like me, it would have taken you your first setback to realize that getting third-party softwares is one thing, but managing them is a whole other game. This, in a nutshell, is how I came across the need for and the value of creating software bills of materials.
A software bill of materials is a comprehensive list of documents that consists of components used to develop the specific software component. An SBOM also includes the open source software and third-party libraries used by the software. SBOMs enable organizations to manage and follow all the softwares used by different softwares in the organizations.
One way in which organizations can effectively manage and maintain their SBOMs is by using specialized software bill of materials tools. These tools allow users to easily track and update the various components and dependencies within their software, ensuring that their software remains compliant and up-to-date. Additionally, software bill of materials tools can help organizations identify potential security vulnerabilities within their software, allowing them to take timely action to address any risks. Overall, the use of SBOM tools can help organizations efficiently manage the complex web of components and dependencies within their software.
Components to Include in a Software Bill of Materials
Let’s first understand the basics of software bills of materials. The main goal of a software bill of materials is to prepare a comprehensive list of software components. With this list, we can determine any security risk associated with these components. In addition, it helps software developers track the origin of software components used and their versions so that any required scenario can be reproduced.
A software bill of materials consists of three items: software components, software dependencies, and other related files.
It is a good quality assurance practice to better manage the risk to comply with security and licensing requirements, including the relationships between the various components.
An SBOM is a common and critical component of the software development lifecycle and the DevSecOps process. According to NTIA, an SBOM has the following foundational components:
Data Fields
Data Fields outline the dependency tree for the application. The main goal of the data fields is to enable the identification of components to track those fields across the software development and supply process and map them to the other sources of data such as license or vulnerability databases.
The data fields include the supplier name, component name, component version, other unique identifiers, dependency relationships, the author of the SBOM, and the timestamp of its creation.
Automation
Modern software development activities are complex, and manually preparing the SBOM is not recommended. Automation is recommended for creating, understanding, and using SBOMs. Automation is mainly used to detect three reporting formats organizations must use when transmitting SBOMs across the organizations: Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX), CycloneDX, and Software Identification (SWID) Tags.
Buffer for Mistakes
SBOM consumers should be able to incorporate and accept only the mistakes they wish to refine during the iterative process.
SBOMs can be created using various tools by integrating CI/CD technology in the development pipeline. An alternative way to build SBOMs is using software composition analysis, which can identify what components are available in which application.
Now, let’s go through the steps of creating a software bill of materials:
Define Project Requirements and Timelines
The processes of understanding a project’s business needs, features, and technical and functional requirements and estimating the efforts required are carried out during the project scope and requirements phase. During this phase, we also need to determine the timelines and milestones for different components.
Stakeholder Validation
The stakeholders, including subject matter experts, developers, and management, should validate software component development and related activities.
Incremental Update
Existing requirements must be changed during each project phase as and when required.
Once the SBOM is ready, it can be published in various formats. HTML is the most preferred option for creating SBOMs. It can also be created in plain text format, Markdown, PDF, or CSV. Apart from this, SBOMs can also be delivered as SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange), SWID (Software Identification) Tags, and Cyclone DX.
SBOMs provide users and organizations with many advantages during the software development cycle. They help you comply with governance and audit regulations, identify and remove potential vulnerabilities, reduce manual or unnecessary burdens on the development teams, provide transparency to customers, and avoid significant business disruptions during audits.
Conclusion
In this article, we understood the basics of software bills of materials. Many software component analysis tools help you create open source SBOMs that can include third-party and custom components. Maintaining a software bill of material is very important when responding to security, license, and operational risks.