Building resilient medical technology supply chains with a software bill of materials.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 33623135.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41746-021-00403-w and PMC identifier 7902663.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
An exploited vulnerability in a single software component of healthcare technology can affect patient care. The risk of including third-party software components in healthcare technologies can be managed, in part, by leveraging a software bill of materials (SBOM). Analogous to an ingredients list on food packaging, an SBOM is a list of all included software components. SBOMs provide a transparency mechanism for securing software product supply chains by enabling faster identification and remediation of vulnerabilities, towards the goal of reducing the feasibility of attacks. SBOMs have the potential to benefit all supply chain stakeholders of medical technologies without significantly increasing software production costs. Increasing transparency unlocks and enables trustworthy, resilient, and safer healthcare technologies for all.