February 22, 2026
Building a container image and deploying it is the easy part. Keeping it patched over weeks, months, and years is where most teams fail. A container image deployed today with zero known vulnerabilities will accumulate CVEs as new vulnerabilities are disclosed against its OS packages, language runtime, and dependencies. You need an automated system that detects stale base images, triggers rebuilds, and rolls out updates safely.
February 22, 2026
A Software Bill of Materials is a machine-readable inventory of every component in a software artifact. It lists packages, libraries, versions, licenses, and dependency relationships. An SBOM answers the question: what exactly is inside this container image, binary, or repository?
When a new CVE drops, organizations without SBOMs scramble to determine which systems are affected. Organizations with SBOMs query a database and have the answer in seconds.
February 22, 2026
Your container image contains hundreds of dependencies you did not write. A compromised base image or malicious package runs with your application’s full permissions. Supply chain attacks target the build process because it is often less guarded than runtime.
The goal is to answer three questions for every artifact: what is in it (SBOM), who built it (signing), and how was it built (provenance).
A Software Bill of Materials lists every dependency in an artifact. Two tools dominate.