Google Online Security Blog
The past year has seen an industry-wide effort to embrace Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs)—a list of all the components, libraries, and modules that are required to build a piece of software. In the wake of the 2021 Executive Order on Cybersecurity, these ingredient labels for software became popular as a way to understand what’s in the software we all consume. The guiding idea is that it’s impossible to judge the risks of particular software without knowing all of its components—including those produced by others. This increased interest in SBOMs saw another boost after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its Secure Software Development Framework, which requires SBOM information to be available for software. But now that the industry is making progress on methods to generate and share SBOMs, what do we do with them?
Generating an SBOM is only one half of the story. Once an SBOM is available for a given piece of software, it needs to be mapped onto a list of known vulnerabilities to know which components could pose a threat. By connecting these two sources of information, consumers will know not just what’s in what’s in their software, but also its risks and whether they need to remediate any issues.
In this blog post, we demonstrate the process of taking an SBOM from a large and critical project—Kubernetes—and using an open source tool to identify the vulnerabilities it contains. Our example’s success shows that we don’t need to wait for SBOM generation to reach full maturity before we begin mapping SBOMs to common vulnerability databases. With just a few updates from SBOM creators to address current limitations in connecting the two sources of data, this process is poised to become easily within reach of the average software consumer.
OSV: Connecting SBOMs to vulnerabilities
The following example u
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