The US government will soon require vendors to provide a software bill of materials to help ensure integrity of an application’s components.

President Biden’s executive order (EO) on cybersecurity, released on May 12, is a sprawling and comprehensive document that aims to redress weaknesses in the digital security ecosystem. It is peppered with nearly 50 actions that the federal government must take within extraordinarily tight timeframes, signaling the urgency of the cybersecurity crisis the country faces.

Several parts of the EO seek to shore up software security. This long-overlooked and arcane topic has taken on new urgency following the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange software supply chain hacks.

The first software security deadline in the EO, assigned primarily to the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is to publish a definition of what constitutes “critical software,” which in turn will trigger actions by other government agencies. NIST’s deadline for producing this definition is June 26, which is why the agency held a quickly organized workshop on June 2 and 3 attended by around a thousand interested parties.

Fifteen days after the release of NIST’s definition of critical software, another arm of the Commerce Department, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will publish “minimum elements” of something that has been evolving over the past several years in the cybersecurity realm, a software bill of materials, or SBOM.

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