People doing software security often use LLMs more as orchestrators than anything else. But there's so many more complicated ways to use them in our space coming down the pipe. Obviously the
next evolution of SBOMs is that they represent not just what is contained in the code as some static tree of library dependencies, but also what that code does in a summary fashion that you can check once you get the final binaries. In a certain sense, you can think of this as a behavioral attestation between the software publisher and the consumer who is actually running the product.
In other words, if my product is meant to connect to
WWW.SPYWARE.RU, then it should say so in the SBOM behavioral manifest. But of course in practice these things get quite complicated, and hence you need to summarize semi-structured data (aka, the behavioral manifest is rarely exact), and then compare it to what is seen when the software itself is run (which if you've ever run strace ...is voluminous). That smells like a job for an LLM, or at the very least, a vector comparison. Likewise, automatically building harnesses to run and capture security sensitive information (or performance information as we learned from XZ), is rapidly also becoming a
job for an LLM.
I perhaps am channeling
everyone else's worry that too much of the SBOM community is arguing about which XML fields belong in a VEX addendum, rather than pushing the concepts forwards to actually solve problems. Or perhaps not! At some level, the software vendors are getting dragged through this process by their hair, which is very fun to watch.
-dave