How to Generate an SBOM with Free Open Source Tools
Generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as part of your DevOps process is an essential technique to help secure your software supply chain. SBOMs are becoming critical due to the growing prominence of supply chain attacks such as Solarwinds, maintainers intentionally adding malware like node-ipc, and severe vulnerabilities like Log4Shell.
SBOMs can help identify the software components used within a system as well as licenses and vulnerabilities. SBOMs also can be used to comply with the Executive Order Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help create SBOMs and generating your first one takes just a few easy steps:
- Choose your SBOM generation tool – we’ll use Syft here
- Download and install Syft
- Determine the SBOM output format you need
- Run Syft against the desired source:
syft <source> -o <format>
Hold on! Before you jump into using open source tools for SBOMs, note that you can get instant access to a free trial of the Anchore Enterprise platform here.
Open Source Tools for Generating SBOMs
There are many tools available for generating SBOMs, so the first thing you’ll need to do is pick one to use. SBOM generators are often specific to a particular ecosystem such as Python or Go. Some are capable of generating SBOMs for a number of different ecosystems and environments. Some of the more popular SBOM tools are:
- Syft by Anchore
- Tern
- Kubernetes BOM tool
- spdx-sbom-generator
For this example we’ll focus on Syft, since it is easy to use in many different scenarios and supports a variety of ecosystems. Syft can run on your desktop, in CI systems, as a Docker container and scan a wide variety of ecosystems from Linux distributions to many types of build dependency specifications.
Getting Syft
The first thing to do is download Syft. There are a number of ways to do this:
Using curl
The recommended method to get Syft for macOS and Linux is by using curl:
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anchore/syft/main/install.sh | sh -s -- -b <SOME_BIN_PATH> <RELEASE_VERSION>
For example:
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anchore/syft/main/install.sh | sh -s -- -b /usr/local/bin
Homebrew
For macOS, you can install Syft using Homebrew:
brew tap anchore/syft brew install syft
Direct Download
You can directly download Syft binaries for many platforms including Windows from the GitHub releases page.
Docker
There is also a Syft Docker image with every release: anchore/syft, which can be run like this:
docker run -it --rm anchore/syft <args>
Validate the Syft Installation
To confirm Syft was installed correctly, simply run:
syft version
You should see output similar to:
Application: syft Version: 0.43.2 JsonSchemaVersion: 3.2.2 BuildDate: 2022-04-06T21:49:04Z GitCommit: e415bb21e7a609c12dc37a2d6395796fb675e3fe GitDescription: v0.43.2 Platform: linux/amd64 GoVersion: go1.18 Compiler: gc
Note: Syft was version 0.43.2 at the time of this writing
Generating Your First SBOM
Once you have Syft available, creating your first SBOM is simple. Syft supports multiple sources to scan when generating an SBOM using both the local filesystem and container images.
Scanning Images
To generate an SBOM for a Docker or OCI image – even without a Docker daemon, simply run:
syft <image>
By default, output includes only software that is included in the final layer of the container. To include software from all image layers in the SBOM, regardless of its presence in the final image, use the –scope all-layers option:
syft --scope all-layers <image>
Scanning the Filesystem
To generate an SBOM for the local filesystem, use the dir: and file: prefixes with either absolute or relative paths. For example to scan the current directory:
syft dir:.
Or a specific file:
syft file:/my-go-binary
Syft can generate SBOMs from a variety of other sources, such as Podman, tar archives, or directly from an OCI registry even when Docker is not available. Check out the full list of sources.
Basic Example
For example, to scan the latest Alpine image, simply run:
syft alpine:latest
You should see output similar to this:
✔ Loaded image ✔ Parsed image ✔ Cataloged packages [14 packages] NAME VERSION TYPE alpine-baselayout 3.2.0-r18 apk alpine-keys 2.4-r1 apk apk-tools 2.12.7-r3 apk busybox 1.34.1-r3 apk ca-certificates-bundle 20191127-r7 apk libc-utils 0.7.2-r3 apk libcrypto1.1 1.1.1l-r7 apk libretls 3.3.4-r2 apk libssl1.1 1.1.1l-r7 apk musl 1.2.2-r7 apk musl-utils 1.2.2-r7 apk scanelf 1.3.3-r0 apk ssl_client 1.34.1-r3 apk zlib 1.2.11-r3 apk
By default, the SBOM you’ll see will be a nicely formatted table rather than any standardized SBOM format, which leads us to…
Choose Your SBOM Format
Depending on your use cases, it may be important to use a particular SBOM format. The most common ones are Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) and CycloneDX, both of which Syft supports. Syft also has a format which interoperates losslessly with the Grype vulnerability scanner.
While Syft supports these different formats, they have slightly different goals and features. It may be important to pick SPDX or CycloneDX for interoperability with other tools or as a standardized format to distribute to downstream consumers.
Generating an SBOM in SPDX format
If your use case requires an SBOM in SPDX format, Syft has you covered. SPDX has been around the longest of all the formats mentioned here. There are multiple variants of SPDX. Syft supports SPDX Tag-value (spdx-tag-value) and SPDX JSON (spdx-json). For SPDX JSON, simply add the -o spdx-json argument. For example, running this against a docker image, again using the latest Alpine:
syft alpine:latest -o spdx-json
You’ll see there is a lot more data than the table view allows! You should see something resembling:
{
"SPDXID": "SPDXRef-DOCUMENT",
"name": "alpine-latest",
"spdxVersion": "SPDX-2.2",
"creationInfo": {
"created": "2022-04-12T01:47:03.011148Z",
"creators": [
"Organization: Anchore, Inc",
"Tool: syft-0.42.4"
],
"licenseListVersion": "3.16"
},
"dataLicense": "CC0-1.0",
"documentNamespace": "https://anchore.com/syft/image/alpine-latest-31e0e940-da83-4ea2-8a0c-fbba76371667",
"packages": [
{
"SPDXID": "SPDXRef-8039c8621bcc1383",
"name": "alpine-baselayout",
"licenseConcluded": "GPL-2.0-only",
"description": "Alpine base dir structure and init scripts",
"downloadLocation": "https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/tree/main/alpine-baselayout",
"externalRefs": [
{
"referenceCategory": "SECURITY",
"referenceLocator": "cpe:2.3:a:alpine:alpine-baselayout:3.2.0-r18:*:*:*:*:*:*:*",
"referenceType": "cpe23Type"
},
{
"referenceCategory": "PACKAGE_MANAGER",
"referenceLocator": "pkg:alpine/[email protected]?arch=x86_64&upstream=alpine-baselayout&distro=alpine-3.15.0",
"referenceType": "purl"
}
],
"filesAnalyzed": false,
"licenseDeclared": "GPL-2.0-only",
"originator": "Person: Natanael Copa <[email protected]>",
"sourceInfo": "acquired package info from APK DB: /lib/apk/db/installed",
"versionInfo": "3.2.0-r18"
}
],
"files": [
{
"SPDXID": "SPDXRef-2eaa15c5fc625ebe",
"comment": "layerID: sha256:8d3ac3489996423f53d6087c81180006263b79f206d3fdec9e66f0e27ceb8759",
"licenseConcluded": "NOASSERTION",
"fileName": "/etc/crontabs/root"
}
],
"relationships": [
{
"spdxElementId": "SPDXRef-8039c8621bcc1383",
"relationshipType": "CONTAINS",
"relatedSpdxElement": "SPDXRef-2eaa15c5fc625ebe"
}
]
}
Not only does this format contain the package names, but also Package URLs, license information, and a host of other things such as files Syft identified associated with a package.
Generating an SBOM in CycloneDX format
Similarly, if you need to generate an SBOM in CycloneDX format use a CycloneDX format option. Syft supports CycloneDX XML (cyclonedx-xml) and JSON (cyclonedx-json). For CycloneDX XML:
syft <source> -o cyclonedx-xml
To run this against the same latest Alpine image, run:
syft alpine:latest -o cyclonedx-xml
And you should see a result resembling this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <bom xmlns="http://cyclonedx.org/schema/bom/1.4" serialNumber="urn:uuid:fb2a4dac-b62b-4d78-b209-40bd09388022" version="1"> <metadata> <timestamp>2022-04-11T22:01:51-04:00</timestamp> <tools> <tool> <vendor>anchore</vendor> <name>syft</name> <version>0.42.4</version> </tool> </tools> <component bom-ref="27f24e002ab47c1b" type="container"> <name>alpine:latest</name> <version>sha256:a3f8ca28888378e4880b3f73504c78278a9038dccf906760a1afd4a08c81c1c1</version> </component> </metadata> <components> <component type="library"> <publisher>Natanael Copa <[email protected]></publisher> <name>alpine-baselayout</name> <version>3.2.0-r18</version> <description>Alpine base dir structure and init scripts</description> <licenses> <license> <id>GPL-2.0-only</id> </license> </licenses> <cpe>cpe:2.3:a:alpine-baselayout:alpine-baselayout:3.2.0-r18:*:*:*:*:*:*:*</cpe> <purl>pkg:alpine/[email protected]?arch=x86_64&upstream=alpine-baselayout&distro=alpine-3.15.0</purl> <externalReferences> <reference type="distribution"> <url>https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/tree/main/alpine-baselayout</url> </reference> </externalReferences> <properties> <property name="syft:package:foundBy">apkdb-cataloger</property> <property name="syft:package:metadataType">ApkMetadata</property> <property name="syft:package:type">apk</property> <property name="syft:cpe23">cpe:2.3:a:alpine:alpine-baselayout:3.2.0-r18:*:*:*:*:*:*:*</property> <property name="syft:location:0:layerID">sha256:8d3ac3489996423f53d6087c81180006263b79f206d3fdec9e66f0e27ceb8759</property> <property name="syft:location:0:path">/lib/apk/db/installed</property> <property name="syft:metadata:gitCommitOfApkPort">dfa1379357a321e638feef1cd8d55ab03d020f45</property> <property name="syft:metadata:installedSize">413696</property> <property name="syft:metadata:originPackage">alpine-baselayout</property> <property name="syft:metadata:pullChecksum">Q1EymS6rAgmGs7XYhqdyEoiWgEZ6A=</property> <property name="syft:metadata:pullDependencies">/bin/sh so:libc.musl-x86_64.so.1</property> <property name="syft:metadata:size">21101</property> </properties> </component> <component type="operating-system"> <name>alpine</name> <version>3.15.0</version> <description>Alpine Linux v3.15</description> <swid tagId="alpine" name="alpine" version="3.15.0"></swid> <externalReferences> <reference type="issue-tracker"> <url>https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/</url> </reference> <reference type="website"> <url>https://alpinelinux.org/</url> </reference> </externalReferences> <properties> <property name="syft:distro:id">alpine</property> <property name="syft:distro:prettyName">Alpine Linux v3.15</property> <property name="syft:distro:versionID">3.15.0</property> </properties> </component> </components> </bom>
Again, there is a lot more data than the table allows, but a different set of data than the SPDX format because there simply is not a one-to-one mapping of properties between the two.
Generating an SBOM in Syft Lossless format
The last format we’ll talk about is Syft’s own JSON format. If there isn’t a need to provide an SBOM to other tools and you may be using Grype to scan the SBOM, the format with the highest fidelity is the Syft JSON format. Both SPDX and CycloneDX lose some amount of information from the initial Syft data model whereas the Syft format does not.
Although Grype works great with SPDX and CycloneDX, there could be a situation where data was lost converting to one of these formats and Grype matching uses some of that extra data, so using the Syft JSON might make the most sense. To use the Syft JSON format, use the -o json argument.
Additional Syft Features
There’s a lot more that Syft can do, with quite a few configuration options. A few things to note include:
- Output the SBOM to a file using
--file path/to/file - Exclude paths from scanning using
--exclude path/**/*.txt - Specify configuration in a
.syft.yamlfile - Connect to private OCI registries
- Cryptographically sign and attest SBOMs
Next Steps
Now that you’ve got an SBOM, what’s next? A logical next step would be to integrate with your build pipeline to have SBOMs generated automatically. In fact, there could be more than one location where it makes sense to generate SBOMs such as build time and after a container is built or during a release process.
The SBOMs then could be scanned for license compliance and continuously for vulnerabilities. In fact, if you are using GitHub Actions, there are a couple actions to do just that: sbom-action to generate SBOMs using Syft and scan-action to perform vulnerability scanning. For a few repositories, it’s very simple to set these up but might be challenging when there are a lot of repositories to keep track of.
Managing SBOMs at scale
As we’ve talked about, using SBOMs as a central part of securing your software supply chain is increasingly important. Integrating automated SBOM generation into your DevOps process is vital. Storing, managing, and analyzing those SBOMs to inform security measures should be an important consideration for you and your organization.
For more comprehensive SBOM management, an enterprise level solution like Anchore Enterprise will enable you to generate comprehensive SBOMs with every build, detect drift from one build to the next, share SBOMs internally or externally, and quickly identify risk such as vulnerabilities, secrets, malware, and misconfiguration. To learn more about Anchore Enterprise, schedule a demo with one of our specialists here.
Conclusion
Now that you understand the many reasons to generate SBOMs (whether for compliance or vulnerability analysis) using Syft to generate SBOMs is a flexible and simple process with many options to tailor SBOMs to your specific use cases.
If you’d like to explore using Anchore Enterprise for its robust features like continuous visibility, SBOM monitoring, drift detection, and policy enforcement then access a free 15 day trial here.
