Photo Courtesy of: Scribe Security
On a frigid Tuesday in December 2020, the United States government discovered a breach that would reverberate across the digital security landscape. Malicious code, quietly embedded in routine software updates from SolarWinds—a trusted IT vendor—had been delivered to more than 18,000 organizations, including the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Treasury. It was a supply chain attack of historic scale and sophistication, and it exposed a deep vulnerability in the nation’s digital infrastructure: no one really knew what was in their software.
In the years since, regulators, technologists, and military strategists have converged on one concept as the cornerstone of supply chain security—the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). Meant to be the digital equivalent of an ingredient list, an SBOM details every component in a software product, including third-party dependencies, open-source code, and libraries. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
“The attack surface has moved upstream,” said a former official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “If you don’t have visibility into what your software is made of, you don’t have control over your risk.”
And this is where
Making SBOMs Actionable
Based in Tel Aviv and built by veterans of Israel’s elite cyber units, Scribe Security has quietly become a key player in the SBOM conversation. The company’s platform does more than just generate software inventories—it verifies, signs, monitors, and continuously updates them as part of an automated feedback loop. This capability, while technical, is transformative. It moves SBOMs from passive documentation to real-time security instruments, capable of alerting institutions to tampering, version drift, or policy violations.
Scribe’s clients include financial services giants, medical device manufacturers, and U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. The company’s integration into the Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP)—a DHS initiative to engage emerging technology providers—underscores the growing urgency to secure critical digital systems, not just from hackers, but from the invisible complexity within modern software pipelines.
In practice, Scribe automates the generation and validation of SBOMs across continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Each component in the software lifecycle—whether code, container, or binary—is cryptographically signed, linked to its origin, and assessed for security risks. The result is an immutable audit trail that can be queried at any moment.
An Incomplete Past, A Mandated Future
Historically, software development emphasized speed over transparency. The widespread use of open-source components, while beneficial for innovation, introduced unknown and unmonitored dependencies into enterprise systems. Before SBOMs gained traction, software makers could not easily identify what third-party code they had used—let alone what risks those components carried.
This changed in 2021, when the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. The mandate included explicit requirements for SBOMs in federal procurements, and laid the groundwork for broader regulation. Today, standards such as NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) and the Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) are being adopted not just as guidelines, but as prerequisites for doing business with the government.
However, compliance remains challenging.
“Many organizations treat SBOMs as a paperwork exercise,” said one senior engineer at a government-contracted defense firm. “They generate them once and forget about them. But attackers don’t wait for quarterly reports—they exploit in real time.”
Scribe’s platform addresses this disconnect by embedding SBOM processes into live development environments. The platform integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, and a broad array of cloud-native tooling, enabling developers to work without halting workflows, while security teams maintain constant visibility.
Defense, by Default
The national security implications of Scribe’s model are particularly significant for the Department of Defense and its contractors, where the margin for error is razor-thin. A single unverified code change in a targeting algorithm or communication protocol could compromise mission integrity or expose vulnerabilities to adversaries. Scribe’s end-to-end provenance tracking, cryptographic attestation system, and tamper detection capabilities create what officials describe as a “digital chain of custody” for software.
By enforcing policy-as-code guardrails, Scribe halts deployments that fail to meet defined security criteria—whether due to missing SBOMs, unsigned builds, or unpatched vulnerabilities. The platform also supports SBOM ingestion from vendors, enabling defense organizations to assess the risk of third-party software before it’s integrated into secure environments.
Why SBOMs Aren’t Enough—Unless They’re Continuous
The concept of an SBOM is not new. What Scribe and a few other firms have done is make SBOMs operational. Static lists offer limited value if they aren’t updated with every build, enriched with vulnerability intelligence, and integrated into policy enforcement systems. Scribe’s platform does all three.
It also provides support for exporting SBOMs in industry-standard formats such as CycloneDX and SPDX, which has allowed customers to share attested component records with regulators and auditors. In regulated sectors—especially banking, healthcare, and defense—this capability simplifies what would otherwise be laborious manual evidence-gathering.
Scribe’s evidence graph—an indexed, queryable store of signed events across the SDLC—also allows institutions to perform forensic investigations in the event of a breach. Unlike traditional logs, which can be deleted or manipulated, these records are cryptographically signed and verifiable against public keys.
From Point-in-Time to Real-Time Security
As geopolitical tensions rise and threat actors target the software supply chain as a vector of asymmetrical disruption, the question of what runs inside government, military, and critical infrastructure systems has taken on renewed urgency. For policymakers, regulators, and cybersecurity architects alike, visibility is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a baseline requirement.
Scribe’s automation of SBOMs and attestations does not make software secure by itself. But it changes who has the burden of proof. In a field where claims of security are common and evidence is rare, that shift is more than procedural—it’s foundational.
“Confidence in software must be earned, not assumed,” said Scribe CEO Rubi Arbel. “And evidence is the only way to earn it.”
This article is published under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging program.