Software Bill of Materials Adoption: A Mining Study from GitHub

Abstract: A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a complete, formally structured list of all the open-source and proprietary software components present in a software product, including their licenses, versions, and vendors. SBOMs enable software creators and consumers to gain visibility into the software supply chain and monitor any risks associated with security or licensing. Thereby, the United States Government and the European Union have brought SBOMs to the forefront of digital policy. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory mining study that aims to investigate the adoption of SBOMs by open-source software projects. To that end, we mined GitHub to identify repositories that use SBOM generation tools developed by SPDX and CycloneDX, identifying a total of 186 public repositories adopting SBOMs. We found that the adoption of SBOMs is low, yet it has an increasing trend. Moreover, SBOM files are available in the repository or published release versions in 46% of the software projects analyzed. SBOMs are getting an increasing attention from software creators and consumers. There is a pressing need for organizations to update their software to meet the new standards required for the software supply chain.

Recommended citation: S. Nocera, S. Romano, M. D. Penta, R. Francese and G. Scanniello, "Software Bill of Materials Adoption: A Mining Study from GitHub," 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Bogotá, Colombia, 2023, pp. 39-49, doi: 10.1109/ICSME58846.2023.00016.
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