At the recent Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, InfoMagnus led a session entitled "Continuous Compliance in Open Source: Safety Assurance Through SBOM-Driven Traceability" where we addressed a critical challenge facing modern safety-critical software development: the Open Source Compliance Paradox. We detailed how today's systems, which are 70-90% open source, are clashing with safety compliance processes designed for a bygone era of closed, waterfall development. This friction creates dangerous bottlenecks that stifle innovation and increase risk.
The solution is to transform compliance from a periodic, manual audit into a continuous, automated function of the development lifecycle. This is achieved by leveraging Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) as dynamic, data-rich assets. By enriching SBOMs with critical safety metadata—such as criticality levels (e.g., ASIL), applicable standards, and direct links to requirements and test cases—they become the machine-readable backbone for a new paradigm of automated governance.
In our talk, we outlined three transformative capabilities unlocked by this approach:
- Automated Impact Analysis: When a component is updated, the system can instantly perform a "diff" between SBOM versions. This allows for the precise identification of all affected safety requirements and test cases, reducing a process that once took days to mere minutes.
- Policy-as-Code: Compliance rules are codified and automatically checked with every build, providing immediate feedback to developers and quality managers, and gating non-compliant changes from ever reaching production.
- Automated Governance: An orchestration engine integrates these checks directly into the CI/CD pipeline, making compliance an intrinsic, automated outcome of development, ensuring that safety and speed are no longer competing priorities.
This presentation was based on work InfoMagnus is doing in partnership with The Linux Foundation’s ELISA project to develop a continuous compliance framework based on the upcoming SPDX 3.1 Safety Profile. While this is still in development, a key takeaway from the session is that organizations can and should start taking steps to enable continuous compliance today. We encourage you to watch the video and reach out if you would like learn how InfoMagnus can help your organization achieve continuous compliance.
