Why Your SBOM Is Only the Beginning of Open Source Security

Over the past two years, Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) have become a staple of open source governance. As regulatory frameworks catch up to modern development practices, security leaders are required to track what components exist in their codebases—down to every transitive dependency.

SBOMs are now mandated across industries. They’re being requested by enterprise customers, security auditors, and even governments. In many cases, they’re viewed as proof that an organization is serious about its software supply chain security.

And yet, having an SBOM doesn’t make you secure. It makes you aware.

This blog explores the limitations of SBOMs as a security solution, why visibility alone isn’t enough, and what organizations must do to turn inventory into action—especially when end-of-life (EOL) software is involved.

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SBOMs Were Designed for Transparency—Not Remediation

An SBOM is a structured inventory. It tells you:

• What open source libraries your software depends on
• Which versions are in use
• Where each component originates from
• The relationships between dependencies and sub-dependencies

This visibility is critical. Without it, vulnerability scanning, risk prioritization, and vendor audits are all compromised.

But SBOMs stop at the point of identification. They don’t:

• Tell you whether a component is still supported
• Patch or remediate vulnerabilities
• Provide SLA-backed maintenance for EOL components
• Prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced via new code

In other words, they diagnose. They don’t cure.

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The Problem: Most SBOMs Reveal More Unsupported Software Than Expected

Security teams often treat SBOMs as a proof of hygiene—until they see what’s actually inside.

The most common scenario we see:

• A company adopts SBOM generation (via tooling like CycloneDX, SPDX, or commercial platforms)
• The first SBOM surfaces dozens of outdated or unsupported libraries, often with no clear patch path
• Critical services rely on EOL components (e.g., Lodash 4, Spring 4, AngularJS, Node 14)
• The security team flags the risk, but the engineering team cannot upgrade due to business constraints
• The result: known risk, with no immediate mitigation

This is what we call the SBOM gap: the chasm between knowing your risk and being able to resolve it.

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Why EOL Components Exacerbate the Gap

If a dependency in your SBOM has an open CVE and is still maintained, your team can usually apply a patch or upgrade. But if that component is EOL:

• The upstream project has stopped releasing fixes
• Your vulnerability scanner may continue to surface CVEs with no available remediation
• Your audit and compliance team may block releases unless the component is removed or replaced

In these cases, the SBOM becomes a liability—not because it's wrong, but because it highlights risks that are unresolvable within current timelines.

The issue isn't visibility. It’s lack of support.

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SBOMs Create Accountability. That’s the Point.

SBOM adoption is not just a compliance trend—it’s an architectural one. As software supply chains become more complex, organizations are realizing that open source governance must operate like vendor management.

Just as you would never deploy commercial software without knowing its support terms or patch SLAs, you shouldn’t run open source components without lifecycle visibility and defined support responsibilities.

SBOMs push organizations toward that maturity. But without a corresponding remediation strategy, they simply expose gaps that engineering teams are ill-equipped to handle alone.

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What Maturity Looks Like

True open source security maturity includes:

1. Component Inventory
   Maintain up-to-date SBOMs across all deployed systems
2. Vulnerability Monitoring
   Scan for known CVEs and assess exploitability in context
3. Support Lifecycle Mapping
   Identify components that have reached or are nearing EOL
4. Remediation Planning
   Triage, prioritize, and assign fixes—either via upgrade or supported maintenance
5. Lifecycle Extension
   For components that cannot be immediately migrated, secure and document them with formal long-term support

This is the difference between compliance theater and operational resilience.

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SBOMs Are a Mirror. Make Sure You Have a Plan for What You See.

The adoption of SBOMs is a step forward. But it only works if organizations are ready to act on what those SBOMs reveal.

When EOL software appears in your stack—and it will—you need more than awareness. You need a way to support what you still depend on, without delay, disruption, or vulnerability exposure.

SBOMs tell you what you’re responsible for. What you do next is what defines your security maturity.

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