Open Source Summit Europe 2022

SBOMs are soon to become a defacto standard for communicating the content of a piece of software. Knowledge about such content is essential for many critical activities (e.g., vulnerability management and license compliance) for securing and ensuring the integrity of software. Today there are many open source and industrial initiatives/tools that focus on producing such SBOMs. However, simply producing an SBOM is not sufficient, instead we must ensure that such SBOMs are trustworthy. In particular, we must ensure that such SBOMs are accurate (not including incorrect dependencies) and comprehensive (not missing any actually-present dependencies). In this talk we advocate the critical importance of quantifying the trustworthiness of a produced SBOM. We provide examples of incorrect SBOMs, then present our efforts and toolsets to verify SBOM. In addition, we will discuss best practices to ensure the trustworthiness and traceability of the actual process that is used to produce the SBOM in turn ensuring that errors can be traced in a systematic manner and providing proof of attestation and due diligence through the whole SBOM generation process. We aim to trigger a community wide discussion on this important and critical topic while sharing our current efforts on this topic.