86% of organizations struggle with SBOM generation, often due to tool sprawl and inconsistent pipelines. Build-time generation is superior to post-build scanning because it captures the resolved dependency graph including transitive dependencies, while post-build scanners rely on heuristics and miss statically linked binaries. Five criteria determine SBOM quality: completeness, accuracy (resolved versions not declared ranges), freshness, verifiability via cryptographic attestation, and format compliance (SPDX or CycloneDX). The generation toolchain itself is attack surface — tools should be pinned to immutable references like commit SHAs. For CI/CD integration, SBOMs should be generated at build time, attached as OCI attestations bound to the image digest, validated before publishing, and paired with continuous scanning for new CVEs. Docker Hardened Images ship with pre-built SBOMs, SLSA Build Level 3 provenance, and OpenVEX data, eliminating the generation burden for base layers.
