SBOM Basics (what and why)
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SBOM as an Operations Tool
- SBOM is a component inventory for your artifact (image, binary, package).
- Ops value: faster CVE response, compliance evidence, and dependency visibility.
- Store SBOM per artifact digest, not per mutable tag.
Runbook: Generate, Store, Query
- Generate SBOM during build.
- Attach SBOM to the artifact (as OCI artifact/attestation or separate storage).
- Index by digest and environment (prod/staging).
- Query when a CVE drops: “which prod digests include package X?”
Example Commands
# Generate SBOM (SPDX JSON) for an image syft registry.example.com/app/api@sha256:DEADBEEF -o spdx-json > sbom.json # Query: list packages quickly (human check) jq -r '.packages[] | [.name,.versionInfo] | @tsv' sbom.json | head
Failure Modes
- SBOM generated but not stored per digest: cannot trust mapping later.
- SBOM exists only for latest tag: breaks incident response.