Automating SBOMs: From Creation to Scanning & Analysis

The Role of SBOMs in Vulnerability Management: Securing the Software Supply Chain

Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) are essential tools for securing the software supply chain. Think of them as ingredient lists for your software, giving you a clear view of all the components and dependencies baked into your applications. They provide a detailed inventory of all software components and dependencies, making it easier to track vulnerabilities, achieve and maintain compliance, and minimize risk. 

In an era where supply chain attacks are on the rise, SBOMs play a critical role in identifying and mitigating threats originating from third-party components, open-source libraries, or even compromised build tools. By enabling transparency and accountability across the software lifecycle, SBOMs empower organizations to act quickly and decisively to secure their supply chain. 

The Benefits of SBOM Automation

Manual SBOM management is a frustrating and error prone strategy that breaks down at scale. Automating the creation, scanning, and analysis of SBOMs is not just about efficiency; it’s about keeping your software supply chain secure and protecting the time of your DevSecOps team from monotonous, low-value work.

• Enhanced speed and accuracy: Automating repetitive tasks doesn’t just save time—it helps to reduce manual errors. 
• Improved security posture: Automatic generation and analysis creates continuous visibility into software components. This inverts your security posture from reactive to proactive. By surfacing vulnerabilities and enforcing compliance, organizations preempt threats before they become incidents.
• Scalability: Manage SBOMs across hundreds or thousands of software artifacts seamlessly and maintain consistent standards across diverse projects.
• Centralized visibility and management: Enterprise SBOM automation tools typically include dashboards and analysis tools that allow teams to extract security, compliance and risk insights across an organization’s entire software portfolio.

Automating SBOM Generation

Generating SBOMs is easy (and cost-efficient) with the help of free, open source tools like Syft. These developer tools compile essential details such as component names, versions, and licensing information. This is ideal for startups, small teams, or companies with limited budgets that are looking for one-off SBOM generation during software development, compliance audits or an evaluation of different SBOM automation tools. But as organizations manage more and more software artifacts and increasingly complex build pipelines, processes that rely on engineers manually executing developer tools on each artifact—even simple and easy to use tools—do not scale for enterprise software factories.  

Integrating SBOM generation into your CI/CD pipeline ensures that every build automatically produces an SBOM. Here’s where SBOM generation fits best:

• Build time: As part of the initial build process, providing a clear inventory of components as they are introduced.
• After containerization: Ensuring SBOMs are generated for containerized applications for both 1st- and 3rd-party applications held in artifact registries.
• During deployment: Validating components before deploying to production.

This layered automation ensures your organization always has a detailed and up-to-date inventory of your software portfolio; this sets the stage for secure and efficient software delivery.

Automating SBOM Analysis & Scanning

Generating SBOMs is just the start; to truly manage risks, you need to continuously analyze SBOM. Automating this process makes it possible to identify security vulnerabilities, license conflicts, compliance violations and other risks before they snowball into bigger issues.

What is SBOM Analysis and Vulnerability Scanning?

SBOM analysis and vulnerability scanning involves the evaluation of an SBOM for potential security risks. By analyzing the SBOM, organizations can cross-reference the listed components against vulnerability databases to identify known security vulnerabilities, outdated versions or licensing issues that could be exploited by threat actors. 

Vulnerability scanning tools automate this process, flagging components with reported vulnerabilities so organizations can prioritize remediation efforts. This practice is critical in modern DevSecOps workflows. It helps ensure software security, compliance, and resilience against cyber threats throughout the development lifecycle.

How to Automatically Scan and Analyze SBOMs for Vulnerabilities

Managing SBOMs at scale requires more than just generating them—you need to continuously scan and analyze their contents for vulnerabilities and risks. Tools like Anchore Secure streamline this process; providing automation, actionable insights, and centralized SBOM management to keep your software supply chain secure. Here’s the short version of how you can integrate SBOM scanning and analysis into your workflows (complete guide here):

1. Automate scanning in your CI/CD pipeline: To ensure every build is secure, set up automated SBOM scanning in your build and delivery pipeline. Integrate scanning at key stages such as post-build and pre-release, and connect your CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.) to Anchore Secure using pre-built plugins or APIs. Define rules to automatically trigger scans based on specific events, like a code merge or container build.
2. Analyze results and monitor risks: Anchore Secure doesn’t just scan for vulnerabilities—it helps you understand and act on the results. View your scan results in a centralized dashboard that organizes issues by severity, package, or project. Focus on fixing high-risk issues first, while planning later remediation for medium- and low-risk items. Next create enforcement policies to block deployments with critical vulnerabilities or specific compliance violations. Automatically alert your team when a policy is violated, ensuring timely action.
3. Schedule regular scans: SBOMs need ongoing attention. Vulnerabilities can emerge after software is deployed due to new CVEs being published or changes in dependencies. Configure Anchore Secure to perform daily, weekly, or event-based scans on critical projects. Anchore’s vulnerability database updates continuously, ensuring new threats are flagged as soon as they’re discovered.
4. Track trends over time: Monitor trends across multiple projects to identify recurring risks or dependencies that frequently introduce vulnerabilities.

Tools for SBOM automation

Free and open source tools to get started on your SBOM journey:

• Syft (by Anchore): Lightweight and fast. Generates SBOMs in SPDX or CycloneDX format.
• CycloneDX Generator cdxgen (by OWASP): Built for creating CycloneDX-compliant SBOMs.
• SPDX SBOM Generator: Built for creating SPDX-compliant SBOMs.
• Tern (by VMware): Python library that generates SBOMs for container images and Dockerfiles.

Next Steps

Automating SBOMs—from creation to scanning and analysis—gives you the power to secure your software supply chain without adding complexity. Tools like Anchore Enterprise let you stay ahead of vulnerabilities, keep your team efficient, and maintain compliance with ease.

Ready to take the next step? Dive into SBOM automation today and see the difference for yourself.