The role of an SBOM in cybersecurity

Once you have a complete list of your software dependencies in an SBOM, you can document known vulnerabilities in them and ensure that they are either patched or that your application or infrastructure is hardened against attacks targeting them, by following DevSecOps best practices.

Benefits of implementing SBOMs

SBOMs have become standard practice in software development due to the benefits they provide, including:

• Security transparency: The SBOM for each software project offers visibility into the surface area it exposes to cyberattack so that security risks can be assessed, and vulnerabilities can be patched or mitigated.
• Software license compliance: Open-source software licenses often have requirements that you must meet in your own project, including sharing your code. Your SBOM should include the open-source or proprietary license for each component, so that you either meet software licensing requirements, or find alternatives if necessary.
• Regulatory compliance: Regulatory frameworks around user privacy stipulate that you must take all possible measures to secure sensitive data. This includes assessing your software and infrastructure for potential attack vectors, and mitigating any discovered risks.

SBOM standardized formats

There are three popular standardized formats for SBOMs:

• Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is developed by the Linux Foundation for documenting packages’ metadata, licenses, and dependencies.
• CycloneDX is the format used by the OWASP Foundation for cybersecurity purposes.
• Software Identification Tags (SWID) is the ISO format for uniquely tagging software for management and compliance purposes.

Challenges in implementing SBOMs

While SBOMs are universally recognized as beneficial, implementing them in your software development lifecycle (SDLC) can pose some challenges:

• You will ideally want to find an automated SBOM and vulnerability management solution that integrates with your existing development tools.
• SBOMs can introduce organizational friction during the implementation stage as developers and stakeholders get used to new tools and processes.
• You will need to decide on how to document proprietary and sensitive components (for example, in-house code that you wish to protect for operational reasons or IP concerns), especially if you’re sharing your SBOM with other parties.
• Documenting legacy software that you don’t have the original source code or documentation for can be difficult.
• Documenting deeply nested dependency trees, especially in the initial stages of creating an SBOM when many dependencies must be reviewed at once, can be time-consuming and complex without automation.

Challenges in maintaining SBOMs

Once you’ve established which vulnerability management tools you will adopt and how they will be implemented, there are ongoing challenges when creating and maintaining SBOMs throughout your SDLC:

• As the size and number of your projects grow, so will the complexity of your SBOMs and the resources required to keep them maintained.
• SBOMs only work if you keep them up-to-date and pay attention to them. You must review your SBOMs and check for new vulnerabilities in existing dependencies as well as new ones.
• Privacy and data security regulations require regular reviews of the tools and standards you implement to create and maintain SBOMs, as well as the data you record in them.

Securing the Cloud: A Guide to Effective Vulnerability Management

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How is an SBOM created?

You can create an SBOM manually by combing through your source code, supporting software (like the host OS and runtime environment), and external dependencies (including APIs) and documenting all of them. This is laborious, however, as there is a significant amount of information you should record about each entry. This is compounded by dependencies that also have their own dependencies.

Tools that can automate the creation of an SBOM for your application by scanning your source code (or a docker image pre-deployment) include Snyk, CycloneDX, Syft, and OWASP Dependency-Check.

Creating an SBOM and scanning for vulnerabilities is only part of the cloud security equation. Vulnerability management using Sysdig Secure not only scans your cloud-native applications for vulnerabilities, but also provides runtime protection in your production environment, ensuring that as-yet undiscovered supply chain threats and hacking attempts can be detected in running applications.

The importance of securing your supply chain

Modern software development relies on being able to leverage open-source and third-party libraries, and other software components, to expedite development, as well as implement best practices and proven solutions that have been developed by experts. For example, it is both more efficient and more secure to integrate a third-party authentication solution than it is to write your own.

While the threat of supply chain attacks does not outweigh these advantages, these attacks do pose an active threat: Python developers have been tricked into installing malicious code in their projects in typosquatting attacks on the PyPi package repository, while JavaScript applications were compromised when the popular event-stream library (with over two million weekly downloads) was taken over by a new developer who added malicious dependencies to the library.

Cloud-native applications and SBOMs

Cloud-native applications are particularly vulnerable to supply chain attacks due to their always-online nature, and the poor visibility of horizontal scaling. A cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that recognizes both the threat of supply chain attacks and runtime intrusions is key to protecting applications that run in the cloud or in hybrid-cloud environments.

Creating and maintaining SBOMs for containerized applications that use technologies like Docker is also vital: Application images are often created and then left unmaintained for as long as they continue performing their function, potentially harboring unidentified malicious code that was included in a dependency. Automated image scanning and the creation of SBOMs mitigate this by ensuring that you are alerted when a component of one of your Docker applications has been flagged as unsafe.

Sysdig vulnerability management protects against malicious code

Sysdig provides supply chain protection to cloud-native applications through its CNAPP platform. In addition to runtime protection, incident detection and response, and posture management in a unified interface, Sysdig integrates into your CI/CD pipelines to help ensure that the software you deploy is free of known vulnerabilities and malicious code.

Check out the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) to learn more about the state of cloud-native security. And if you are securing your cloud applications and workloads, download our free e-book: Securing the Cloud: A Guide to Effective Vulnerability Management.

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