logoalt Hacker News

pacificpendanttoday at 9:17 AM0 repliesview on HN

You’re right that SBOMs cannot be used to attest that a library is correctly used. I’m not sure if that’s a common use-case of SBOMs though. I normally see people wanting SBOMs for security transparency (customer can see if you’re maintaining your dependencies), vulnerability management (customer can know what vulnerabilities lurk in the dependencies) and license compliance (they can know you didn’t use any dependencies with licenses that cause commercial issues).

Related to your point though is that just because a dependency is vulnerable doesn’t mean the software using it is affected too. It might not use the functionality that’s vulnerable. Which means a supplier needs to share their assessment of each dependency vulnerability.