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The State of the SBOM Tool Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of SPDX and CycloneDX

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arxiv 2512.21781 v2 pith:IGCKLPE4 submitted 2025-12-25 cs.SE

The State of the SBOM Tool Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of SPDX and CycloneDX

classification cs.SE
keywords sbomspdxtoolscyclonedxecosystemsopen-sourcetoolacross
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) improve software release transparency by documenting components and dependencies, but their practical value depends on the tools that generate, analyze, and manage them. This paper compares the tool ecosystems of the two dominant SBOM formats: SPDX and CycloneDX. We analyze 108 open-source and 62 proprietary SBOM tools, compare ecosystem-level health metrics across 470 SPDX and 171 CycloneDX tools, examine 36,990 issue reports from open-source tools, and study the top 250 open-source projects using each format. Our results show that CycloneDX-using projects often exhibit stronger developer engagement and selected project health indicators, while SPDX benefits from a larger, more mature tool ecosystem and broader industry adoption. These findings highlight the complementary strengths of both ecosystems and identify opportunities for improving SBOM tooling across formats.

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