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Re:UEFI Software Bill of Materials Proposal by kube-system on Thursday November 16, 2023 @11:57AM (#38292005)
Open sourcing doesn't alleviate the need for an SBOM. Regardless of source availability or license type, it shouldn't be a lengthy engineering exercise to determine what software components an organization is running every time a CVE is published. The people doing patch management at large organizations are typically not software engineers, and even if they are, they don't have time to read source code. The questions they are trying to answer should be able to be answered programmatically in seconds.
Re:UEFI Software Bill of Materials Proposal by narinxas on Thursday November 16, 2023 @06:19PM (#38297065)
it's the political principles I'm critizicing.

the technical problem is really essentially a matter of trust, blockchains solved this problem in the technical sense.

the opreations of large organization are typically private property... this is a touchy issue because technology corporations are essentially the government by this point

I guess I should be glad this isn't really my problem, I'm just worried about the public and political consequences of what I see as potentially dangerous mistakes being made on the idelogical level

Re:UEFI Software Bill of Materials Proposal by kube-system on Thursday November 16, 2023 @07:29PM (#38297649)
You're misunderstanding the factors driving this initiative. This isn't an attempt to address the problem of trust. Software can be found to have vulnerabilities even if they are highly trustworthy, and almost all vulnerabilities in commercially used software are accidental. The organizations asking for SBOMs (this is currently receiving a lot of attention due to changes the US government has made to require them for their internal use) have other mechanisms to establish trust with their software vendors.

The straw that broke the camel's back on this issue was CVE-2021-44228 -- which was a vulnerability in open source software. If you missed that debacle -- the problem wasn't that people distrust Apache or software that use Log4j. The problem was that people didn't know where all it was installed.

This was because it isn't currently a standard for software developers to provide a list of all of their dependencies, regardless of whether they're open source or not. This isn't because they are untrustworthy. It just simply isn't standard practice. SBOMs are an attempt to standardize such a list.

Re:UEFI Software Bill of Materials Proposal by narinxas on Saturday November 18, 2023 @07:25AM (#38318760)
you're ignoring my point, well.. not exactly "ignoring", more like explaining how and why the issue I was critizicing is completely irrelevant from where you stand

however, thanks to all this dialogue, do see where my own critizicism goes amiss; and for that, thanks a lot.