Hello Reader,

In this episode, I'm doing a mega-recap, focused on SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials). Over three podcast episodes, I've been honored to talk to some of the biggest names in the SBOM community about why SBOMs matter, what’s driving interest right now, and how they can help us make software safer and more trustworthy

- Allan Friedman of CISA, known as the father of SBOM

I love this quote because it sums up the core reason for SBOMs: we need to see what’s under the hood before we can protect it.

I first got involved with SBOMs just over a year ago, driven by my goal to make Screenly adhere to Secure by Design. During that journey, I co-led a CISA working group on SBOM Generation (white paper coming soon). Diving deeper into SBOMs showed me key shortcomings in existing tooling, so I created sbomify (also available on GitHub) to help fill those gaps around SBOM life cycle.

Why This Matters

Software Bills of Materials are like a list of ingredients for our software. They tell us what parts go into the code, so we can track down risks or vulnerabilities quickly. A few highlights:

• Transparency: SBOMs let us see inside our software. We can spot which libraries are used and who wrote them.
• Security and Risk: When people discover a big flaw (like Log4j), SBOMs help us see if we’re affected.
• Compliance: Regulations such as the US Executive Order on cybersecurity and the EU Cyber Resilience Act make SBOMs more important than ever.

Why Now

US Executive Order (14028)

• The White House said federal agencies must demand better security practices, including SBOMs, from software suppliers.
• This has pushed private companies to adopt SBOM tools, so they can quickly prove what’s inside their software.

EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)

• Europe is also raising the bar. Under the CRA, companies must keep a machine-readable SBOM for products sold in the EU.
• This helps everyone find vulnerabilities and fix them faster.

Rising Demand Everywhere

• Customers now ask for SBOMs as part of security and license compliance reviews.
• Large manufacturers (like medical device makers) see SBOMs as table stakes. Even SaaS providers are exploring SBOMs to increase transparency.
• Compliance frameworks (SOC2, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO27001, PCI DSS etc) are all moving towards this SBOM as a universal inventory of software.

Episode Summaries

I combined three shows on SBOMs for one mega recap:

Allan Friedman - The father of SBOMs

Allan, a key SBOM champion at CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), explained how modern software depends heavily on open source. We also talked about the US Executive Order and why the government wants more transparency.

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​Episode home, or watch on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcast.

Steve Springett - Creator of CycloneDX

Steve is the brain behind CycloneDX, an SBOM standard. We chatted about how SBOMs need to be a repeatable process, not a one-time event. He stressed the importance of automation and how tools can plug into a CI/CD pipeline.

Steve is also the creator creator of the now famous (SBOM based) security audit tool Dependency Track.

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​Episode home, or watch on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcast.

Kate Stewart and Gary O’Neall - SPDX

These leaders in the SPDX community shared how SPDX began with open source license compliance. Now it’s also used for security. We compared SPDX and CycloneDX and how each tackles SBOM data. In the end, both formats let us answer the same question: “What’s in our software?”

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​Episode home, or watch on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcast.

Thanks for reading my SBOM mega-recap! If you have questions or stories about SBOMs, I’d love to hear them. I hope this newsletter helps you see how powerful SBOMs can be for security, compliance, and peace of mind.

If you have any questions, comments or just want to catch up - just reply to this email.

Many thanks,
Viktor

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