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Chainguard Enforce provides a comprehensive solution for monitoring your cloud workloads and container images. In particular, its SBOM generation and ingestion features enhance your ability to manage the software components within your environment.
Chainguard Enforce will automatically generate SBOMs using Syft when an existing SBOM is not available. This ensures that you always have detailed insights into the packages included in your images, without any additional effort on your part. Additionally, the Chainguard Enforce Console provides a handy interface that allows you to find and filter the SBOMs for every package on every cluster overseen by Enforce. This guide outlines these SBOM features in Enforce.
Software Bills of Materials — better known as SBOMs — are among the most valuable tools available for understanding and securing one’s software supply chain. So much so that it’s becoming more common for anyone running or supplying software in certain regulated fields to be required to include them. Executive Order 14028 is one recent example.
Because they can show all the software running in a given cluster, SBOMs are often discussed in the context of software supply chain security. But their use goes beyond that of a security tool; after all, when properly implemented, SBOMs provide useful information about the software you’re running.
Say that you’re concerned about running software nearing its end of life. SBOMs contain information about software versions that you can use to monitor how close various software components are to the end of their lifecycle. For another example, say you’re concerned about license compliance. Because SBOMs also store license information, you can also be sure that you’re only running software that falls under certain licenses.
Chainguard Enforce was designed to build off the value of SBOMs by harnessing the information they provide to better understand everything that’s running in a given cluster. It comes with a number of useful features that help you make the most out of SBOMs in your cloud workloads, including the following.
The remainder of this article outlines Chainguard Enforce’s SBOM features in more detail.
SBOMs are essentially files consisting of raw JSON data. When Chainguard Enforce “ingests” an SBOM, it’s converting its JSON structure into structured data that can be queried within a database. This allows Chainguard to retrieve key information about an SBOM, like the packages contained within it, their versions, and their license details.
Any time you run a workload in a supported Container Runtime (including EKS, GKE, and Cloud Run) monitored by Chainguard Enforce, it will first check if there are already SBOMs included in the workload’s container images. We support both signed SBOMs (for example, an SBOM uploaded by cosign attest as an in-toto attestation) as well as unsigned SBOM (for example, an SBOM uploaded by cosign attach sbom). Chainguard Enforce supports both the SPDX and Cyclone DX SBOM schemas, meaning that SBOMs must conform to these standards in order for Enforce to ingest them.
cosign attest
cosign attach sbom
If there are container images without an existing SBOM, Enforce will assist by automatically creating SBOMs using Syft. This means that you don’t have to worry about generating the SBOM yourself or performing any additional steps. Enforce takes care of it for you, ensuring that you have comprehensive package information for each image.
Generated SBOMs will be clearly indicated in the Enforce user interface. In the SBOM section of the Console, you will find a list of all the SBOMs associated with your images. The generated SBOMs will be marked with a blue Generated tag next to them, indicating that they were automatically created by Enforce using Syft. This helps you identify which SBOMs were generated on-demand and which ones were ingested from external sources.
To streamline this process, we don’t require any user action to enable SBOM generation. As soon as it detects a container image running in one of your clusters without an SBOM, Chainguard Enforce will generate one for you.
The Chainguard Enforce Console offers a high-level overview of SBOMs across different IAM groups, giving you a comprehensive picture of the software components used within your organization.
To navigate to this overview, visit the Chainguard Enforce Console in your web browser (console.enforce.dev/, expand the Enforce section in the left hand sidebar, and choose the SBOM to find the SBOM overview.
console.enforce.dev/
This overview includes a column for the Name of each SBOM. It also has a Description column that gives a breakdown of the different types of packages and files listed in each SBOM.
When you click on an SBOM, it expands to show a list of the packages listed within it. The package names appear in the Name column along with the package’s version number. If available, the Description column will include a brief description of the package.
The Purl colum shows each package’s purl (short for package URL) — a standard URL format that can be used by package managers, APIs, programming languages, and other tools to identify software packages. To the left of each purl is a “Copy” icon; if you click this icon, the associated purl will be copied to your clipboard.
To the right of the Purl column is the License column, which shows license information for each package. Finally, the last column — Export — lists a button for each SBOM, allowing you to download it to your local machine.
Chainguard Enforce provides a powerful search functionality. This allows you to search for specific packages, versions, licenses, or even a file within the SBOMs.
Using the search feature, you can find relevant information about a particular package or version, ensuring that you stay informed about the software components in your environment. Whether you are investigating vulnerabilities, ensuring license compliance, or tracking specific versions, the SBOM search functionality in Enforce makes the desired information more accessible.
From the SBOM overview, you can query the SBOMs to retrieve a variety of information. For example, you can search for specific packages by their name. This example shows the search results for “openssl”.
The search bar will also return files with names matching the search criteria. This example shows a file named bash in the search results for “bash.”
bash
You can also search for packages matching a certain license type. This example shows some of the results for the phrase “GPL.”
We encourage you to use this search bar to find and filter packages in your own clusters managed by Chainguard Enforce.
If you’d like to learn more about how Chainguard Enforce handles SBOMs, we recommend that you check out our guide on SBOMs and Attestations in Chainguard Enforce. This conceptual article digs deeper into the differences between SBOMs and attestations and how each is handled by Enforce.