The funds from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund will be used to integrate security features such as zero trust capabilities and tools for software bill of materials.
What work is actually involved in the Software Bill of Materials stuff? When I search for “Freebsd SBOM” I mostly get references to this news story.
There seems to be tools that generate SBoM reports automatically, is it just a case of adding plugins into the build pipeline?
Mostly it is dealing with the fact that these tools tend to be language/build tool specific and most of them implement the spec badly. Then there is the part where you actually need to have something like Dependency Track setup which compares the versions in the SBOMs with the versions in security reports (such as CVEs, GHSAs,…) but most of those don’t really take into account distro level patches. I suspect the latter will be the largest part of the work for something distro-like such as FreeBSD.
