The U.S. Army Announces Software Quality Mandate
The Army recently announced their Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) mandate, requiring SBOMs from all Software Vendors starting in February 2025. The SBOM mandate is part of their approach to managing risk and eliminating threats in the U.S. and partner nations’ software supply chain.
SBOMs, as outlined in the new requirement, give organizations a view into the safety and risk of the software they’re consuming. In short, a Software Bill of Material’s tells you what’s in a piece of software. This transparency empowers organizations to prevent software supply chain attacks like the ones we’ve seen in recent years, including SolarWinds, log4x, and xz utils.
Supply chain attacks are on the rise and the army’s guidance is in line with many other organizations advocating for securely developed and high-quality software.
Integrate SBOMs Into Your Compliance Workflows
To prepare for SBOM compliance, organizations who do business with the U.S. Army should take a proactive approach and act quickly to implement NTIA compliant SBOMs into their software production and sales processes. Particularly for organizations who sell revenue generating software at scale to the U.S. Army, finding efficiencies in SBOM production, management, and sharing is critical.
Lineaje has helped major enterprises streamline SBOM compliance. In my career, I have led teams developing products for large-scale organizations and was responsible for responding to major software supply chain incidents.
Here are the best ways organizations can gain control of their software supply chain compliance when selling to the Army:
- Full Stack Scanning: Full stack scanning ensures comprehensive security and compliance by examining all layers of your software stack, including base container image, run-time utils, and applications. Unlike traditional methods that focus on isolated areas, this approach reduces blind spots and strengthens the overall security posture. It proactively detects vulnerabilities across the entire software stack, ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements and addressing supply chain risks.
- End-to-End SBOM Workflow Automation: Automating SBOM creation, management, vulnerability detection, and compliance allows Software Vendors to focus on product development while meeting Army requirements.
- CI/CD Integration: Integrate tooling into your development pipelines, ensuring that all SBOMs and security data are updated automatically with each software release.
- Continuous Monitoring: Continuously monitor for vulnerabilities, compliance risks, and software provenance, ensuring that Software Vendors can provide the Army with assurance of their software’s security and integrity.
- Automated Reporting: Compliance reports, risk assessments, and SBOMs should be automatically generated and ready for Army acquisition or audits, streamlining the approval process.
How Lineaje Can Help You Manage Your Software Supply Chain
Lineaje helps Software Vendor’s support the U.S. Army in their effort to build a safer software supply chain by providing a streamlined and automated solution tailored to meet these demands.
Our platform provides end to end software supply chain management and security for organizations selling to the U.S. Army. Here’s how Lineaje helps software vendors meet these requirements efficiently:
- End-to-End SBOM Workflow Automation
- Software Provenance, Trust Levels, and Integrity
- Continuous Monitoring and Compliance Reporting
- Secure SBOM Asset Management and Multi-Tenant Access
- Integrate into Army Acquisition Processes
End-to-end SBOM Workflow Automation
- Challenge: The Army requires all software, including Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), to provide a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) that details all components, including third-party and open-source libraries.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- Assess your risk by scanning your full software stack, including proprietary, third-party, and open-source components.
- Automatically produce and share accurate, NTIA ready SBOMs.
- Integrate into your CI/CD pipelines to keep your SBOMs continuously updated as your software evolves.
Vulnerability Detection and Incident Management
- Challenge: Mandatory continuous monitoring, reporting, and response for vulnerabilities and security issues identified in software components.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- Automated vulnerability detection in open source, proprietary, and third-party components.
- Continuous monitoring of vulnerability databases and integrating VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange) to prioritize exploitable vulnerabilities.
- Generate automatic reports when vulnerabilities are detected, ensuring that Software Vendors can respond promptly.
- Eliminate the need for manual checks and get real-time updates from the Army about the security posture of the software you consume or produce.
Software Provenance, Trust Levels, and Integrity
- Challenge: Software vendors must provide the Army with visibility into the origin of their software components to ensure no compromised code from third-party vendors.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- Gain visibility into your software supply chain with end-to-end provenance for each component, including origin, integrity, and authenticity.
- Automatically verify the integrity of the software components at various stages of development and deployment.
- Assess risk with component attestation level mapping for your applications, which acts as a risk heat map for the software you sell.
Active Compliance Monitoring and Reporting
- Challenge: Software vendors must meet the Army’s strict compliance requirements and continuously verify the accuracy of SBOMs and vulnerability data.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- Continuously track updates and changes to software components, ensuring they stay compliant with Army regulations.
- Automated compliance scans verify your software's adherence to military standards.
- Automatically generate compliance reports that can be shared with the Army, saving vendors the time and effort required to manually audit their products.
- Demonstrate that the software meets regulatory and security requirements without added overhead.
Secure SBOM Asset Management and Multi-Tenant Access
- Challenge: The Army requires software vendors to securely share SBOMs with different teams while ensuring data privacy.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- COTS vendors can store their SBOMs in our secure, private SBOM management and sharing system.
- Robust access controls provide access to the Army and other authorized parties.
- Securely share SBOMs, vulnerability data, and compliance reports with the Army through secure channels.
- Ensure that data privacy is maintained while meeting the Army’s visibility requirements.
Seamlessly Integrate into Army Acquisition Processes
- Challenge: During Army acquisition, Software Vendors must demonstrate that their software meets supply chain risk management (SCRM) standards and provide validated SBOMs.
- Lineaje's Solution:
- Meet acquisition requirements by generating fully traceable SBOMs, providing risk assessments, and verifying the integrity of all software components.
- Deliver all necessary documentation for pre-and post-acquisition processes without manual effort.
- Tie your build data to your SBOM, to ensure that every SBOM delivered to the Army is automatically aligned with supply chain security standards.
- Remove the need for additional compliance validation steps.
Get Started with Lineaje Today
Let us help you cut the time, cost, and complexity of meeting the Army’s SBOM and supply chain security requirements, while accelerating your digital transformation.
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