Vijay Raina is a foundational voice in the world of enterprise SaaS and software architecture, bringing a wealth of experience to the complex intersection of security and transparency. As a specialist in software design, he has watched the industry transition from a “black box” approach to one where the internal composition of a product is under constant scrutiny. In recent years, his focus has shifted toward the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), a technical artifact that has rapidly evolved from an internal inventory checklist to a high-stakes legal requirement. Raina’s expertise is particularly relevant today as global regulations tighten their grip on the software supply chain, forcing organizations to rethink how they prove their products are secure without compromising their intellectual property. Throughout this discussion, we explore the strategic nuances of “least disclosure,” the structural separation required to protect sensitive build metadata, and the critical importance of moving away from manual, error-prone documentation toward automated, pipeline-integrated security.
The regulatory landscape has shifted dramatically with the introduction of the European Cyber Resilience Act and the U.S. Executive Order 14028. How have these mandates changed the way organizations view the Software Bill of Materials?
The transformation has been nothing short of a paradigm shift for the enterprise software sector. We have moved quickly from an era where an SBOM was a voluntary, internal artifact used by developers to track their own inventory, to a world where it is a mandatory disclosure required for market access. If you look back to 2021, the United States Executive Order 14028 really set the stage by making these bills of materials a requirement for government procurement, effectively signaling that transparency was no longer optional. This was followed by the NIS 2 Directive and the European Cyber Resilience Act, which place immense pressure on manufacturers to document their software composition in a way that is both traceable and reliable. It is a stressful time for many because this isn’t just about listing libraries anymore; it is about providing hard evidence of supply chain security to operators of essential entities. For many organizations, the SBOM has become a double-edged sword—it is the evidence they need to establish trust, but it also creates a situation where they feel they are handing over a blueprint of their internal architecture.
There is a recurring concern that being too transparent with an SBOM can actually increase a product’s attack surface. Why is a complete bill of materials considered so sensitive from a security perspective?
The sensitivity of a complete bill of materials lies in the incredible level of detail it provides to someone with malicious intent. It is far more than a simple list of ingredients; a comprehensive SBOM often includes precise version numbers, the full transitive dependency chain, and even internal package names that were never meant for public eyes. When a developer looks at a product built with Maven or Gradle, they see a deep, branched ecosystem where one library might pull in dozens of others, and an SBOM reveals every single one of those links. This level of technical profiling allows a competitor to guess your strategic architectural choices or an attacker to map out every potential vulnerability point in your stack. You are essentially providing a manual for attackers, showing them exactly which frameworks you avoid, which ones you rely on, and precisely where you might be running an outdated version that is ripe for exploitation. We have to treat the SBOM as a core property of the product’s security, recognizing that publishing it carelessly is a form of surrender rather than an act of transparency.
In your architecture work, you advocate for a principle called “least disclosure.” How does this concept solve the conflict between wanting to be transparent and needing to stay secure?
Least disclosure is a foundational strategy that moves us away from the “all or nothing” approach to sharing data. It is based on the idea that you should only provide as much information as a recipient specifically needs for their purpose and no more, provided you can prove the integrity of what you are sharing. This clears up the massive misunderstanding that transparency requires making every single detail of your build process broadly available to the public. In practice, this means viewing your SBOM not as a static file that you email to everyone, but as a dynamic database from which you generate specific, “redacted” views based on the context of the request. By shifting the question from “should we share?” to “what should we share and with whom?”, we allow for controlled transparency. This approach protects the manufacturer from unintentional overexposure while still satisfying the regulatory and safety needs of the person on the other end of the transaction.
You’ve identified four main groups that typically request SBOM information. How do their data needs differ, and why is a “one-size-fits-all” approach so dangerous?
Trying to serve every recipient with the same universal SBOM is a recipe for disaster because their needs are functionally at odds with each other. The general public, for instance, typically only needs a very high-level view that includes component names, licenses, and project references to ensure basic compliance, especially with open-source software. On the other hand, a customer who is evaluating a major purchase needs much more granular metadata, such as version levels, to conduct their own risk analysis. Then you have auditors and regulatory authorities who aren’t necessarily looking for every technical detail, but they absolutely require evidence that is complete and verifiable to ensure the product meets legal standards. Finally, your internal teams and suppliers need the deepest, most operational data possible to actually manage and update the software. When companies try to use a single document for all these people, they usually end up sending massive email attachments that lack any form of control or revocation capability, which is a significant security failure.
To implement these different levels of access, you suggest a structural separation between public and private disclosure. Could you explain how a model like the one used by Exodos Labs achieves this?
The structural separation is vital because it prevents the line between public and private data from blurring into a messy middle ground. In a robust model, like the one seen at Exodos Labs, you draw a hard boundary between a public “SBOM Trust Center” and a private “Secure Exchange.” The Trust Center serves as a public-facing portal that provides a continuously updated but deliberately limited view of the software’s composition, satisfying the general need for transparency without revealing the crown jewels of the architecture. Meanwhile, the Secure Exchange is a hardened channel designed for the controlled transfer of detailed, sensitive information to specifically authorized organizations. By assigning public and private data to these separate channels from the start, you make it much harder for a developer or a release manager to accidentally overexpose sensitive build details. It’s about building a technical architecture that enforces security policy by design rather than relying on human memory.
Redaction is often misunderstood as simply deleting lines from a text file. How does sophisticated redaction work when generating multiple views from a single SBOM database?
Sophisticated redaction is a dynamic process of masking, aggregating, or hiding data based on who is asking for it. It is not about cutting down a finished document; it is about generating an intentionally designed view from your master data set. For a public view, you might redact internal package sources and private registry references entirely so that your internal infrastructure remains a mystery to the outside world. For a trusted customer, you might summarize transitive dependencies rather than listing every single branch, which provides a high-level security posture without giving away the entire technical profile. You might even have a “contractually protected” view that is only unlocked after a non-disclosure agreement is signed, revealing version numbers that would otherwise be hidden. The goal is to ensure that each view matches the specific openness suitable for the audience, ensuring that sensitive build and generator metadata never reaches a party that doesn’t have a legitimate, verified need for it.
When it comes to deciding who gets to see which view, you argue that simple roles like “Customer” or “Partner” are insufficient. Why is Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) a better fit for this task?
Simple role-based models are too crude for the complexity of modern software relationships because just because someone is a “customer” doesn’t mean they should have blanket access to every piece of technical metadata for every version of your product. Attribute-Based Access Control is far more scalable and precise because it looks at a combination of characteristics before releasing a specific view. This includes the requester’s organization, their specific product entitlement, the status of their non-disclosure agreement, and even the regulatory context of their request. We also look at the release status of the software and whether there are temporal limitations—perhaps their access should expire after a certain period. By using these intersecting attributes, you can enforce rules consistently even as you scale to thousands of different recipients with unique contractual requirements. It takes the guesswork out of the disclosure process and ensures that the question of “who decides” is handled by a robust, automated policy engine.
For an SBOM to be truly dependable, it must be provable. What does it mean to have “auditability” and “release binding” in this context?
Demonstrability is the cornerstone of trust; without it, an SBOM is just a collection of claims that may or may not be true. Auditability means that every single interaction with your bill of materials is recorded in an immutable trail—you need to know exactly who requested access, which specific view they were shown, and which version they exported. If a dispute arises or a vulnerability is discovered, this audit trail replaces vague assertions with hard evidence of what was shared and when. Release binding is the other half of that equation, ensuring that a bill of materials is unambiguously tied to a specific artifact, such as a JAR file, a container image, or a specific Git tag. We use artifact hashes and container digests to create this link so that during a security incident, there is no confusion about whether the SBOM actually describes the software currently running in production. Together, these two elements transform a simple file transfer into a provable, professional transaction that can stand up to the scrutiny of an auditor.
One of the biggest pitfalls in this process is manual maintenance. Why is it so critical to integrate SBOM generation directly into the CI/CD pipeline?
Manual maintenance is where security goes to die. If your team is compiling bills of materials by hand or updating static pages after a release, those documents are almost certainly stale by the time they are published, which makes them completely worthless during a real-time security crisis. The generation, validation, and publication of an SBOM must be an automated part of the build and release pipeline. When you integrate with tools like Maven or Gradle, a current bill of materials is generated with every single build and automatically checked against your quality and security criteria. In the Trust Center model, this data feeds directly from the supply chain into the public portal, ensuring that the disclosure always reflects the actual, current state of the software. This automation eliminates the recurring, time-consuming question of “which version is the latest?” and prevents the most common mistakes, such as missing release bindings or forgotten revocation of access.
What is your forecast for the future of software supply chain transparency?
I believe we are heading toward a future where the “uncontrolled” sharing of software data will be seen as a significant compliance failure, much like a data breach is viewed today. As the European Cyber Resilience Act and similar global standards become fully operational, the industry will move away from the “maximal disclosure” trap and toward a highly orchestrated, automated exchange of security metadata. We will see the rise of standardized, machine-readable protocols that allow different organizations’ supply chain tools to communicate and verify each other’s SBOMs without human intervention. The companies that will thrive are those that stop viewing transparency as a threat to be minimized and start seeing it as a strategic instrument of trust. In the next five years, the ability to provide a secure, redacted, and verifiable bill of materials will be as standard—and as essential—as having a valid SSL certificate is for a website today.
