Achieving SBOM Accuracy: Generate or Validate with Confidence

Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) have become a foundational requirement for managing software supply chain risk, responding to vulnerabilities, and meeting emerging global regulations. From medical devices and industrial control systems to automotive and connected products, modern systems rely on increasingly complex software stacks composed of open-source, third-party, and proprietary components. However, most organizations still lack full visibility into what software is actually shipped within their products.

This solution brief explores the challenges producers and consumers face when generating, validating, and operationalizing SBOMs—and how Keysight SBOM Generator addresses these challenges through high-fidelity, binary-first analysis.

A primary challenge in SBOM creation is accuracy. Many existing SBOM tools rely on source-code or build-time analysis, which often fails to reflect what is ultimately delivered to customers. These approaches commonly miss statically linked libraries, proprietary vendor blobs, embedded components, and legacy code. As a result, SBOMs generated by traditional tools can be incomplete or misleading, leaving organizations exposed to hidden vulnerabilities such as Log4Shell buried deep within firmware or containers.

When new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are disclosed, these gaps become critical. Without trustworthy SBOM data, organizations struggle to identify which products are affected, which versions are at risk, and which specific components contain the vulnerability. This uncertainty slows response times, increases operational overhead, and amplifies security and compliance risk—especially as regulations such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), FDA cybersecurity mandates, and U.S. Executive Order 14028 increasingly require SBOMs as a baseline for compliance.

To address these challenges, organizations need SBOM solutions that go beyond surface-level scanning. High-fidelity SBOMs must accurately represent shipped software, not just declared dependencies. This requires deep binary-level inspection capable of detecting closed-source, proprietary, statically linked, and embedded components. Equally important is the ability to validate and verify SBOMs received from suppliers, ensuring completeness, correctness, and consistency across the supply chain.

Keysight SBOM Generator is designed to meet these needs. Using patent-pending binary similarity analysis and code emulation, Keysight delivers SBOMs with unmatched accuracy and coverage. The solution analyzes shipped firmware, binaries, and containers directly—without requiring access to source code or build systems—making it well suited for third-party, legacy, and closed-source software.

Keysight’s binary-first approach enables precise identification of software components, including accurate naming, version detection, and assignment of unique identifiers such as CPEs and PURLs. This precision allows organizations to reliably correlate vulnerabilities and licenses, improving both security posture and operational efficiency. The solution also supports deep dependency discovery, capturing static and dynamic dependencies that are commonly missed by traditional scanners.

Beyond generation, Keysight SBOM Generator supports validation, normalization, and quality scoring of SBOMs. Organizations can assess SBOM completeness against required regulatory and industry-defined fields, automatically correct inconsistencies, and enrich SBOM data to improve interoperability and downstream analysis. Standards compliance is built in, with support for the latest SPDX and CycloneDX formats to ensure forward compatibility as schemas evolve.

Automation is another critical advantage. Keysight enables SBOM lifecycle automation—from generation and validation to continuous vulnerability monitoring and reporting—dramatically reducing manual effort. What once took weeks of manual or semi-automated work can now be completed in minutes with significantly higher accuracy. Continuous monitoring ensures that newly disclosed vulnerabilities are quickly mapped to affected products and versions, enabling faster, more confident response.

For both producers and consumers, the business impact is significant. Producers can generate regulator-ready SBOMs that accurately reflect shipped products, accelerating compliance and building trust with regulators and customers. Consumers can validate supplier SBOMs, establish consistency across their supply chain, and reduce the risk of hidden vulnerabilities entering their environments. Across the organization, teams benefit from improved visibility, faster vulnerability triage, and auditable, compliance-ready reporting.

By delivering accurate, trustworthy SBOMs at scale, Keysight SBOM Generator helps organizations strengthen software supply chain security, reduce operational risk, and confidently meet evolving regulatory and customer requirements.