DEVOPSdigest

Codenotary announced TrueSBOM, a patent-pending, self-updating Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for every application that is made possible by simply adding one line to the application source code.

With TrueSBOM, applications self-report their components so that the SBOM always remains up-to-date.

“When I buy a sandwich in the grocery store, all the ingredients are there, printed right on the label, which is great for people with allergies or other dietary restrictions. However, you have to trust the sandwich-maker to correctly label the sandwich with its true ingredients,” said Moshe Bar, co-founder and CEO, Codenotary. “What if every application had a label (the SBOM) automatically generated and always updated, even if the application is modified – no need for any sort of manual or automated intervention. Now, you can always trust the app’s SBOM. We think this is a game changer.”

TrueSBOM guarantees that the SBOM for an application is always a true reflection of the components of an application, even when it self-updates – and that the SBOM is not just a text file that is stored separately from the application, but rather it’s part of the application itself that export on request its own SBOM or list of ingredients. This is especially important for modern applications that self-update, where relying on an external SBOM generation at build-time would not pick up the new updates.

In addition, TrueSBOM allows the enrichment of the SBOM with vulnerability scanner results or trust and integrity information.

“When the log4j supply chain vulnerability was discovered in December 2021, the first question of every CIO was ‘how can I find all instances of this log4j library in the hundreds or thousands of applications in my business?’,” said Dennis Zimmer, co-founder and chief technology officer, Codenotary. “In other words, every organization wants to know which applications to trust and which ones to remediate immediately. TrueSBOM gives companies the security they’re looking for by keeping the list of contents in an app up-to-date at all times.”

A version of TrueSBOM is also available for serverless applications on AWS Lamda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions. Until now, SBOM generation for serverless apps was nearly impossible. TrueSBOM for serverless applications solves that issue.

Also, TrueSBOM for WebAssembly (WASM) provides the same self-updating SBOM capability so that WASM applications can always be verified for harmful contents.

TrueSBOM works with any software application – whether open source or proprietary code.