protobom

protobom is a protocol buffers representation of SBOM data able to ingest documents in modern SPDX and CycloneDX versions without loss. It has an accompanying Go library generated from the protocol buffers definiton that also implements ingesters for those formats.

Standard SBOMs are read by a reader using parsers that understand the common formats. Parsers create a neutral protobom from data read from CycloneDX or SPDX documents.

A protobom can be rendered into standard SBOM formats by the writer using serializers that know how to generate those documents.

Supported Versions and Formats

The following table summarizes the current support for formats and encodings in the golang library.

Format	Version	Encoding	Read	Write
SPDX	2.2	JSON	planned	-
SPDX	2.2	tag-value	planned	-
SPDX	2.3	JSON	supported	supported
SPDX	2.3	tag-value	planned	-
SPDX	3.0	JSON	planned	planned
CycloneDX	1.4	JSON	supported	supported
CycloneDX	1.5	JSON	supported	supported

Other read and write implementations can potentially be written in other languages supported by protobuf

Usage

The protobom library can be used to read in and write out SBOM documents in any of the above formats.

Example 1: The sbom-convert project

https://github.com/bom-squad/sbom-convert provides a complete example of using the library to ingest an SBOM into the protobom intermediate format and then write out a new SBOM document in a different format.

Example 2: Read in SBOM document to work with specific field(s)

The protobom library is the best and easiest way to interact with SBOM documents using the Go programming language. In this example, we show how to easily access the SBOM programmatically by creating a new protobom Reader, and calling reader.ParseFile() to read an SBOM document file and return a protobom sbom.Document. In this example, protobom handles the document unserialization regardless of the format. The developer using protobom can then work with a consistent protobom intermediate representation with the actual file format abstracted away.

This particular example iterates over each node of the SBOM document's list of nodes and prints the ID, Name, and Version of each node. If the input document is an SPDX SBOM, each protobom Node will describe a single SPDX package. If the input document is a CycloneDX SBOM, each protobom Node will describe a CycloneDX component. The developer using protobom does not need to change the code based on the input format. The protobom library parses the input document to present an intermediate format of the data allowing the developer to work with a consistent intermediate format instead.

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/bom-squad/protobom/pkg/reader"
)

func main() {
	// Create a new protobom SBOM reader:
	reader := reader.New()
	document, err := reader.ParseFile("sbom.spdx.json")
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Printf("ERROR: %v\n", err)
		return
	}

	// List all nodes in the SBOM and print some information about them:
	for _, node := range document.GetNodeList().GetNodes() {
		fmt.Printf("Node ID [%v]: name: %v version: %v\n", node.GetId(), node.GetName(), node.GetVersion())
	}
}

Example 3: Generate an SBOM document programmatically

Developers can use the protobom library to generate SBOM documents based on the content of a separate SBOM document, as shown by the sbom-convert project (https://github.com/bom-squad/sbom-convert).

However, the protobom intermediate representation could also be used to create a new SBOM document. Developers could create a new protobom document and use the Go programming language to populate the fields needed in the SBOM document. The developer would then create a new Writer to define where the SBOM should be written, and to which format the SBOM should be written passing in the programmatically-defined SBOM structure. The protobom v0.2.0 release includes five registered serializer formats for Writer.New(): SPDX23JSON, CDX12JSON, CDX13JSON, CDX14JSON, and CDX15JSON.