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ossbomer

Profile-driven SBOM validation, conformance, and license policy for SPDX and CycloneDX.

Most SBOM tools answer one question. ossbomer answers three in a single pass:

  • Is the document structurally valid, judged against the spec version it declares?
  • Does it carry the fields a given regulation asks for, at that regulation's severity?
  • Given how you ship this software, does policy allow the licenses it declares?

You pick a profile, which is one YAML file binding all three. So "does this SBOM meet the EU CRA" is one argument instead of three tool runs and a spreadsheet.

Fourteen usable profiles ship with it, covering CISA 2026, NTIA 2021, EU CRA, BSI TR-03183, India CERT-In, OpenChain Telco, FedRAMP, OMB M-26-05, AIBOM, and four license use cases. Every rule cites the clause it comes from, and the documents those citations point at are in the repository with checksums, so a finding can be traced rather than taken on trust.

Full documentation: https://semclone.github.io/ossbomer/

Install

Requires Python 3.10 or newer; tested through 3.13.

pip install "ossbomer[oslc]"

The oslc extra pulls in ospac, which evaluates license policy. Every license-* profile needs it. Plain pip install ossbomer works if you only need schema and conformance.

Upgrading from 0.1.4 is a breaking change: that release predates the profile engine, and the per-layer commands it shipped now behave differently. See the changelog.

Use

ossbomer validate --profile cisa-2026-min --file sbom.json
============================================================
Profile: CISA 2026 SBOM Minimum Elements
Verdict: FAIL (191 MUST violations)
Quality score: 64 / 100
  Completeness: 74
  Accuracy:     60
  Consistency:  100
  Provenance:   42
  Freshness:    60
Top issues:
  1. Freshness: schema-min-version: cyclonedx 1.4 is below required minimum 1.5 [document.specVersion]
  2. Provenance: cisa26-sbom-author-signature: signed_with_x509: SBOM is not signed [document]
  3. Freshness: cisa26-sbom-data-format-version: format_version_at_least: cyclonedx 1.4 is below required minimum 1.5 [document]
============================================================

Most real SBOMs fail a minimum-elements profile today. The verdict answers whether the document meets the standard; the score tells you how far off it is.

--profile repeats, and each profile is evaluated on its own with its own verdict and score. Nothing is averaged between them, because a good NTIA score tells you nothing about CRA readiness.

Output can be console, json, or sarif. The exit code works as a CI gate: 0 if nothing failed, 1 if a profile failed, 2 if the file could not be read or the profile named is withdrawn. Nothing calls the network.

Declared licenses are normalized to SPDX first, so policy is never asked about a string it cannot identify. GPL-2.0+, MIT or Apache-2.0, npm's MIT || Apache-2.0 and Apache 2 all resolve. Family names like BSD and GPL do not, because they name no single license, and they are reported as unresolved rather than guessed at.

Formats

Format Versions JSON XML Tag-value YAML
CycloneDX 1.3 - 1.6 yes yes not applicable no such serialization
SPDX 2.2, 2.3 yes yes yes yes
SPDX 3.0 structural only no official schema not applicable no

Validation follows the version the document declares, using cyclonedx-python-lib and spdx-tools rather than vendored schemas.

Documentation

Getting started Install it and read a result
Profiles The catalog, and writing your own
License policy Use cases, SPDX expressions, overrides
Using it in CI Gating a build, SARIF and code scanning
Verdicts and exit codes How findings become one answer
CLI reference Every command and flag

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Adding a profile is the most approachable place to start, since profiles are YAML rather than code.

Every change lands through a pull request with green CI. Contributors sign a CLA once, in the pull request, by replying to the bot. Participation is governed by the Code of Conduct.

Please do not open a public issue for a security vulnerability. Report it as described in SECURITY.md.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.

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Profile-driven SBOM validation, conformance, and license policy (SPDX / CycloneDX)

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