Create a software bill of materials (SBOM)

In February 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published version 1.1 of the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF), a set of comprehensive guidelines on secure software development practices in response to the 2021 Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO) 14028.

As part of these requirements, the US government might request a software bill of materials (SBOM), which lists components of a software release.

SBOMs are automatically generated for Android Continuous Integration (Android CI) builds. If you use one of the CI builds, use the following steps to obtain an SBOM for a build. Otherwise, follow the steps to generate a custom SBOM.

Obtain a pregenerated SBOM

To obtain a pregenerated SBOM:

  1. In your browser, navigate to ci.android.com.

  2. In the Enter a branch name field, type aosp-main.

  3. For any of the builds with green status, click the View artifacts down arrow. The Build artifacts screen appears.

  4. In the Build artifacts screen, use a find command to locate the SBOM JSON file (CTRL+F or CMD+F).

Generate a custom SBOM

For any additions to the platform, including any binary or build and release tool chains, you must provide a SBOM representation of your product that meets the Minimal Elements for a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). To generate a custom SBOM:

  1. Run the following commands to set up your environment and build the SBOM:

    $ source build/envsetup.sh
    $ lunch TARGET
    $ m sbom # Generates an SBOM

    The TARGET refers to the same build target that you are using to build Android, such as aosp_arm64-userdebug.

  2. To ensure the SBOM built correctly, execute:

    $ ls out/dist/sbom*