Treat build systems, scanners, and signing services as privileged machine identities. Restrict their access, rotate their secrets, and monitor their behaviour because compromise of those accounts can undermine the integrity of the entire SBOM process.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
SBOM tooling is often treated as a compliance wrapper around software delivery, but the identities that power it can influence whether an SBOM can be trusted at all. Build systems, dependency scanners, signing services, and artifact publishers typically hold broad read and write access across repositories, registries, and pipelines. If those non-human identities are overprivileged, an attacker does not need to break the SBOM format; they can tamper with the evidence that feeds it.
That is why governance must focus on the machine identities behind the tooling, not just on the document output. Security teams should define ownership, scope, authentication strength, and lifecycle controls for each service account or workload identity. This is aligned with the intent of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which emphasises governance and protection of critical assets across the software supply chain. The practical question is whether each SBOM-related identity can do only what is necessary, only for as long as necessary, and only in the environment where it belongs.
In practice, many security teams discover SBOM trust issues only after a signing key, CI token, or scanner credential has already been abused to alter pipeline output.
How It Works in Practice
Effective governance starts by inventorying every identity involved in SBOM creation and verification. That includes source-code scanners, dependency harvesters, build orchestrators, attestation and signing services, package publishers, and any API client that pulls metadata from external ecosystems. Each should have a named owner, a documented purpose, and a narrowly defined trust boundary.
From there, apply controls that fit the identity’s function. Long-lived secrets should be replaced with workload identity, federation, or short-lived credentials where possible. Signing services should be isolated from general build permissions. Scanners should have read-only access to the repos and package feeds they inspect, and nothing more. If a tool only needs to generate an SBOM, it should not also be allowed to publish artifacts or change release metadata.
- Assign each SBOM-related NHI to one pipeline role and one business purpose.
- Use least privilege for repository, registry, and signing access.
- Rotate secrets and keys on a schedule, and after any pipeline change.
- Log identity use, not just application events, so anomalous automation can be detected.
- Validate attestation and provenance independently of the tool that produced them.
Security teams should also monitor for drift in behaviour. A scanner that suddenly accesses new repositories, a signing identity that operates outside release windows, or a build token that is reused across environments can all indicate control failure. Current guidance from the software supply chain community increasingly favours provenance, cryptographic signing, and identity-aware attestation, but there is no universal standard for every SBOM implementation yet. The best practice is to bind the SBOM workflow to strong identity, strong logging, and a clear approval path for privilege changes. For implementation context, the OWASP guidance on supply chain risk and software supply chain governance is a useful complement to internal policy.
These controls tend to break down when SBOM generation is embedded in legacy CI systems that reuse shared service accounts across multiple projects because identity attribution and privilege scoping become unreliable.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter identity controls often increase pipeline friction, requiring organisations to balance release speed against trust in the SBOM process. That tradeoff becomes sharper in multi-team platform environments, where one build system may support many products and one scanner may need access to several code stores.
Shared infrastructure is the most common edge case. Best practice is evolving toward per-workload identities and ephemeral credentials, but many environments still rely on central CI service accounts. In those cases, teams should compensate with strong segmentation, separate signing keys, and distinct approval workflows for production and non-production use. Another edge case is outsourced or managed build services, where the organisation may not fully control the runtime. There, identity governance should be backed by vendor assurance, key custody rules, and explicit logging requirements.
SBOM workflows that include AI-assisted code analysis or agentic automation create a further identity bridge. If an AI agent can call scanner APIs, submit build jobs, or trigger signing, that agent becomes a privileged non-human identity and should be governed as such. For that reason, practitioners should align governance with OWASP software supply chain guidance and treat any autonomous orchestration path as a control point, not just a convenience feature. Where regulated software delivery is involved, there is no universal standard for exactly how much attestation evidence is enough, so organisations should define acceptance criteria in policy and revisit them after major pipeline changes.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST AI RMF and NIST AI 600-1 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | SBOM tooling depends on governed identities and controlled access across the pipeline. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI-assisted build and analysis workflows need governed risk management and accountability. | |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | Service accounts, signing identities, and scanner credentials are classic non-human identities. | |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | Autonomous agents that trigger scans or sign releases need explicit privilege and tool governance. | |
| NIST AI 600-1 | GenAI used in build or supply chain workflows can distort evidence without output validation. |
Inventory SBOM-related identities and enforce least privilege, logging, and review for each one.
