Augmenting Software Bills of Materials with Software Vulnerability Description: A Preliminary Study on GitHub

Augmenting Software Bills of Materials with Software Vulnerability Description: A Preliminary Study on GitHub

연구 분야: Infrastructure

학회: FSE Companion '25: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Software Bills of Material (SBOMs) are becoming a consolidated—and often enforced by governmental regulations—way to describe software composition. However, based on recent studies, SBOMs suffer from limited support for their consumption and lack information beyond simple dependencies, especially regarding software vulnerabilities. This paper reports the results of a preliminary study in which we augmented SBOMs of 40 open-source projects with information about Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) exposed by project dependencies. Our augmented SBOMs have been evaluated by submitting pull requests and by asking project owners to answer a survey. Although, in most cases, augmented SBOMs were not directly accepted because owners required a continuous SBOM update, the received feedback shows the usefulness of the suggested SBOM augmentation.