June 2023
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
10h 12m
English
Content preview from Software Transparency
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CHAPTER 5Challenges in Software Transparency
Early in the discussion in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) software bill of materials (SBOM) initiatives, the topic of SBOMs for devices arose as a complicated factor. Currently, the consensus is that SBOM is such a new concept for many organizations that complicating the discussion is undesirable. After all, isn't device software and firmware just software?
Firmware and Embedded Software
We'll break up this category into a few discussion areas: firmware as an operating system, firmware for embedded devices, and the topic of how SBOMs are used in certain device-specific scenarios such as medical devices.
Linux Firmware
Firmware as an operating system, especially as it relates to Linux firmware, is the most easily understood, but it's important to note that these are very complex SBOMs. Linux is essentially thousands of software products cobbled together to form an operating system. As such, it may be challenging to obtain the level of clarity needed to gain transparency into that software. But this is one of the easier problems to solve in this space. Many of the tools we see for Linux tend to do little more than run a Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) command, unless the image is processed by large-scale reverse engineering processes or SBOMs are produced on a per-software-object level as part of the build process. The reality is that there's so much fragmentation in the way Linux OSs are built ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.