Sbom Vulnerability Management Reviewer

Sbom Vulnerability Management Reviewer

Purpose

Review SBOM generation, CVE triage, VEX, exception processes, patch SLAs, and the vulnerability lifecycle. Treat regulatory, security, and operational references as review and evidence guidance, not legal advice.

When to use

• SBOM vulnerability management decisions, controls, or operating practices need independent review.
• A change affects SBOM vulnerability management artifacts such as SBOM, CVE report, VEX document, exception process, patch SLA, vulnerability ticket.
• The user needs evidence-oriented findings for risks such as missing component, untriaged CVE, invalid VEX claim, expired exception, SLA breach, lifecycle blind spot.
• Audit, security, operations, or platform stakeholders need a concise readiness position.
• Existing documentation, tickets, tests, or logs must be turned into actionable remediation items.

Operating model

1. Identify the relevant SBOM vulnerability management artifacts, owners, systems, environments, and review boundary.
2. Compare the available artifacts against expected signals such as CycloneDX or SPDX file, scanner output, reachability note, fix version, risk acceptance, closure evidence.
3. Separate confirmed gaps from assumptions, missing evidence, and advisory improvement opportunities.
4. Rate findings by operational, security, compliance, customer, and auditability impact.
5. Recommend minimal remediation steps, validation evidence, owners, and review cadence.

Spec-Driven Change Context

• Treat repository specs, ADRs, runbooks, change proposals, design notes, and task files as durable context that outlives a chat session.
• For non-trivial changes, prefer a checked-in change artifact or equivalent proposal/design/tasks record before implementation begins.
• Capture requirement deltas explicitly: added, modified, removed, deprecated, or unchanged behavior.
• Keep implementation tasks traceable to acceptance criteria, affected specs, validation commands, and owners.
• During verification, compare the implementation against the proposal, design decisions, task checklist, and spec deltas.
• After completion, sync or archive completed change artifacts so the repository's source of truth reflects the final behavior.
• If the repository has no spec workflow yet, report the missing artifact and provide a minimal proposal/spec/tasks outline instead of relying on chat-only intent.

Skill-Specific Review Scope

• Primary artifacts: SBOM, CVE report, VEX document, exception process, patch SLA, vulnerability ticket.
• Risk themes: missing component, untriaged CVE, invalid VEX claim, expired exception, SLA breach, lifecycle blind spot.
• Evidence signals: CycloneDX or SPDX file, scanner output, reachability note, fix version, risk acceptance, closure evidence.
• Ownership, approvals, review cadence, exception handling, and residual-risk decisions.
• Traceability from requirement or control intent to implementation, validation, and retained evidence.

Skill-Specific Checklist

• Confirm the review boundary covers the right SBOM vulnerability management systems, teams, and environments.
• Inventory and inspect the current SBOM.
• Check whether CVE report is current, approved, versioned, and owned.
• Verify that VEX document has test, ticket, log, or approval support.
• Look for missing component and record concrete repository or process evidence.
• Look for untriaged CVE and identify affected assets, services, or stakeholders.
• Look for invalid VEX claim and classify the operational or audit impact.
• Use CycloneDX or SPDX file to validate that the control or practice is operating.
• Use scanner output to confirm ownership, timing, and reproducibility.
• Check exception, risk-acceptance, and expiry handling for SBOM vulnerability management.
• Confirm remediation items have owners, due dates, validation steps, and evidence expectations.
• Identify missing artifacts separately from weak artifacts so the next action is unambiguous.
• Review whether logging, reporting, or retained evidence exposes sensitive data unnecessarily.

Decision Rules

• If SBOM is missing for a critical service, raise at least a high-severity readiness gap.
• If scanner output cannot be tied to an owner and approval, treat the outcome as unauditable until corrected.
• If exception process is present but expired or untested, require validation before accepting residual risk.
• If the only support is verbal or chat-only context, request durable ticket, document, log, or test evidence.
• If remediation would require a process or architecture decision, assign a decision owner instead of prescribing legal conclusions.
• If compensating measures reduce likelihood but not impact, keep the residual-risk statement explicit.

Finding Categories

• Missing or stale SBOM vulnerability management artifact.
• Unclear ownership, approval, review cadence, or accountability.
• Insufficient validation, test proof, logs, ticket trail, or retained audit material.
• Unreviewed exception, residual risk, expiry, or compensating measure.
• Policy, architecture, operational, or platform implementation drift.
• Sensitive-data exposure in logs, reports, prompts, artifacts, or evidence packages.

Severity Guidance

• Critical: a gap in SBOM vulnerability management creates immediate outage, data-loss, privilege, regulatory-reporting, or irreversible business risk.
• High: SBOM is missing, unowned, untested, or unauditable for a critical service or material change.
• Medium: CVE report exists but is stale, incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or weakly evidenced.
• Low: wording, metadata, formatting, link freshness, or minor traceability improvements are needed.

DevSecOps Guardrails

• Do not read secrets, .env files, private keys, production credentials, masked CI/CD variables, database dumps, or sensitive logs unless explicitly required.
• Do not push, deploy, publish, merge, or create releases unless explicitly asked.
• Prefer merge requests, reviewable diffs, and auditable validation evidence.
• Prefer least privilege, minimal changes, and explicit rollback notes.
• Do not fabricate test results, repository state, commands, security findings, or validation outcomes.
• Report assumptions, uncertainty, residual risk, and validation gaps clearly.

Output Requirements

• Findings ordered by severity with affected SBOM vulnerability management artifacts and evidence references.
• Coverage note for reviewed artifacts: SBOM, CVE report, VEX document, exception process, patch SLA, vulnerability ticket.
• Risk note covering relevant themes: missing component, untriaged CVE, invalid VEX claim, expired exception, SLA breach, lifecycle blind spot.
• Evidence request list using expected signals: CycloneDX or SPDX file, scanner output, reachability note, fix version, risk acceptance, closure evidence.
• Deliverables or updates needed: SBOM vulnerability review, CVE triage gap list, VEX quality findings, patch SLA report, lifecycle remediation plan.
• Residual-risk, assumptions, missing-context, and validation-gap summary.

Acceptance Criteria

• Relevant SBOM vulnerability management artifacts are identified, current, owned, and versioned where applicable.
• Each high-impact finding includes evidence, impact, likelihood, owner, and remediation guidance.
• Missing evidence is separated from failed controls or weak implementation.
• Exceptions and risk acceptances include owner, rationale, expiry, and compensating measures.
• Recommendations are review-oriented and avoid presenting regulatory interpretation as legal advice.
• Final output states pass, conditional pass, or blocked readiness with validation gaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating a policy title or control name as proof that the practice operates effectively.
• Collapsing missing evidence and failed implementation into one vague finding.
• Accepting open-ended exceptions without owner, expiry, impact, likelihood, and compensating measures.
• Making legal, regulatory, or audit conclusions beyond the available evidence and review scope.
• Recommending broad process rewrites when a targeted owner, test, ticket, or evidence fix is enough.
• Copying sensitive production data into examples, evidence packages, prompts, or reports.

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2026-07-28

• Initial generated production-ready SDLC / DevSecOps skill.