With the explosive rise of open-source adoption and increasingly sophisticated supply chain threats, the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has become an increasingly important pillar for modern DevSecOps practices.
A SBOM serves as a comprehensive inventory, detailing every component, library and dependency included in your software much like an ingredient label for packaged food, but for digital assets. This transparency provides clear lineage for all code and third-party elements, enabling organisations to swiftly pinpoint and address security vulnerabilities when new threats or zero-day exploits are disclosed.
For development, security and compliance teams, having a machine-readable SBOM streamlines risk management, accelerates incident response and ensures regulatory compliance, ultimately fostering trust among users, partners and auditors in a world where software integrity is critical.
Why This Matters Now
Globally, regulatory momentum is pushing SBOM adoption from best practice to baseline. National standards such as NIST (USA) SBOM guidance, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s shared vision for SBOM-enabled transparency now highlight the importance of visibility across all dependencies in software ecosystems. Beyond compliance, SBOMs are emerging as a fundamental mechanism for proactive defence-empowering organisations to pre-emptively detect exposure rather than react post-incident.
What is a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)?
Think of it as a nutrition label for your software, a detailed list of all components, dependencies and licenses that make up your application.
Why Are Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Important?
1. Enhanced Security
SBOMs provide a detailed inventory of every component and dependency in your application. This transparency allows organisations to:
- Quickly identify if they’re exposed to high-profile vulnerabilities (like Log4j) and act fast.
- Monitor and patch components before threats escalate, instead of reacting after the damage is done.
2. Risk Management and Incident Response
Knowing every ingredient in your software lets you:
- Assess supply chain risks more precisely.
- Respond rapidly – if a vulnerability is found in a component, teams can see what’s affected and push out patches efficiently.
3. Compliance and Licensing
Many industry standards (such as PCI DSS, NIST and various government frameworks) now require documentation of software components for compliance. SBOMs also surface licensing obligations and help legal teams avoid accidental violations of GPL, Apache or other open-source licenses.
4. Operational Efficiency and Trust
- Speeds Up Audits: Automated SBOMs replace manual review and Excel sheets, saving hours during compliance checks.
- Builds Trust: Customers, partners and regulators increasingly demand SBOMs as proof that your development practices are secure and accountable.
What Does a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Look Like? (Example)
{
"components": [
{
"name": "log4j-core",
"version": "2.13.3",
"supplier": "Apache",
"licenses": ["Apache-2.0"],
"dependencies": ["log4j-api"]
},
{
"name": "jackson-databind",
"version": "2.11.0",
"supplier": "FasterXML",
"licenses": ["Apache-2.0"]
}
]
}An SBOM typically consists of several critical elements or data fields that represent each component in the software along with associated metadata.
| Meta Data Fields | Description |
|---|---|
|
Component Name |
log4j-core |
|
Version |
2.13.3 |
|
Supplier |
Apache Software Foundation |
|
License |
Apache-2.0 |
|
Dependency Relationship |
Depends on log4j-api |
|
Unique Identifier |
pkg:maven/org.apache.logging.log4j/log4j-core@2.13.3 |
|
Checksum |
SHA256 hash value |
|
SBOM Author |
CI/CD pipeline tool name |
|
Timestamp |
Date & time of SBOM generation |
How JFrog Artifactory + Xray Empower SBOMs
JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Xray work together to to deliver an automated, intelligent SBOM process that includes:
- Continuous Integration and Generation: SBOMs are automatically produced in formats like SPDX or CycloneDX as part of the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring consistency and reducing human error.
- Continuous Enrichment: JFrog Xray enhances each SBOM with live vulnerability, license and compliance data drawn from global threat intelligence feeds.
- Proactive Dependency Management: Outdated, deprecated or risky components are flagged through analytics, allowing developers to modernise or patch before risk matures.
- Governance and Auditability: Artifactory acts as the immutable source of truth, maintaining versioned histories and immutable logs for audit and compliance mapping.
- Policy Enforcement and Access Control: Integration with role-based policies ensures controlled SBOM publishing and prevents unauthorised changes to critical software metadata.
- Deep Recursive Scanning: JFrog Xray scans artifacts and dependencies in depth to proactively identify transitive dependencies that may introduce hidden vulnerabilities.
- Analytics and Reporting: JFrog provides dashboards and APIs to analyse SBOM data, track trends and generate compliance and governance reports.
Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Best Practices:
- Use Standard Formats – Adopt SPDX or CycloneDX for portability and machine-readability.
- Include Rich Metadata – Include names, versions, licenses and dependency relationships for completeness.
- Continuously Update – Regenerate SBOMs with each build or patch cycle to preserve accuracy.
- Store and Share Securely – Make SBOMs accessible via Artifactory for audits or third-party validation; secure them with access control and signing.
- Shift Left with Security – Integrate JFrog Xray scanning early in development workflows to surface vulnerabilities before deployment.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
In practice, JFrog Artifactory and Xray bring SBOM automation to life by embedding continuous visibility, compliance and security directly into the CI/CD workflow. This enables teams to build with confidence through:
- Seamless Pipeline Integration: SBOMs are automatically produced as part of every CI/CD build, no manual steps required.
- Centralised Visibility and Export: Teams can view and export SBOMs from the JFrog dashboard for any Docker image, Maven artifact, or npm package.
- Integration with Issue Trackers: Detected vulnerabilities or non-compliant dependencies can trigger automated Jira or ServiceNow tickets for remediation.
- Continuous Enrichment: Xray continuously updates SBOM data as new CVEs or licensing updates emerge.
- Proactive Dependency Management: Identifies at-risk libraries and EOL dependencies pre-emptively.
- Role-Based Policy Enforcement: Automatically blocks releases failing compliance checks.
- API & CLI Automation: SBOM generation, enrichment and validation can be fully automated through JFrog CLI or REST APIs for enterprise-scale workflows.
Quick Recap
- SBOMs are now essential as global regulations tighten and software supply chain attacks surge, making transparency, traceability and compliance non-negotiable.
- JFrog Artifactory and Xray simplify SBOM adoption by automating generation, enrichment, governance and policy enforcement, embedding security, compliance and auditability into every build.
- Continuously updated SBOMs improve visibility, accelerate vulnerability response and strengthen stakeholder trust across the software lifecycle.
- Adopting SBOM best practices ensures a proactive, resilient and transparent approach to securing the modern software supply chain.
As one of the first Australian JFrog partner’s and one of the few Australian organisations that specialise in GitHub + JFrog, we are uniquely positioned to address your JFrog and or GitHub needs. Get In touch with a JFrog + GitHub expert today!
