Generating a SBOM on custom made images or ftp trees

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

SUSE is publishing SBOM (Software Bill Of Material) data in SPDX and CycloneDX format for its published media.
For customers building their own images using kiwi or similar tooling, it is occasionally needed to create a SBOM.
Currently it is not yet integrated into kiwi, but SUSE's tooling can be used for the purpose of creating SBOMs.

Installing the tool

Install the "build" package from SUSE, available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Module Development Tools module, openSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed repositories.

The build tool sources is available via https://github.com/openSUSE/obs-build

Running the tool

After installing the "build" package, you can use the "/usr/lib/build/generate_sbom" tool included in the package.
 
Primary options for the tool are:

--distro "sbom distroname"

  The name your distribution or build should present in the SBOM.

--format spdx / --format cyclonedx

  The format of the SBOM, you can select either SPDX or CycloneDX format.
  If you want to generate both, call the script twice with different format options.

--intoto 

  Optional, the SBOM data is encapsulated in in-toto attestation format.

The tool can fetch data from several sources to generate SBOM data:
 
--dir DIRECTORY

  Points to a installed system below DIRECTORY, using its RPM Database for SBOM extraction.

--product DIRECTORY

  Looks for all RPMs files in a directory tree below DIRECTORY and extracts SBOM information from them.

--rpmmd DIRECTORY

  Uses a RPM-MD style DIRECTORY (e.g. an update or product repository).

CONTAINER.tar

  Extracts SBOM data from the specified OCI CONTAINER.tar file.

The SBOM file will be output to stdout.

Note that the tool generally works by using RPM meta information at this time. The SUSE RPMs are correctly tagged for this, for third parties it needs to be ensured that these have correct license, URL and other tags.
The tool currently does not go deeper than the RPM level.