in-toto VS python-tuf

The things you mentioned are not solved by a typical "SBOM" but e.g. CycloneDX has extra fields to record provenance and pedigree and things like in-toto (https://in-toto.io/) or SLSA (https://slsa.dev/) also aim to work in this field.

I've spent the last six months in this field and people will tell you that this or that is an industry best practice or "a standard" but in my experience none of that is true. Everyone is still trying to figure out how best to protect the software supply chain security and things are still very much in flux.

in-toto is an open source project that focuses on the attestation part of software supply chain security. You use it to define a “layout” for a project, i.e., how the different components should fit together. A project ships this definition with its code, and then another user of that software can compare what they have with the attached definition to see if it matches the structure and contents they expect. If it doesn’t, then this could point to external tampering or other issues.

But it's not all doom and gloom because the industry is evolving. Companies like Google are formulating tools like scorecard to heuristically reduce risk by encouraging you to rely on trustable dependencies only. There's also more complex tools like in-toto that actually look at the integrity of your supply chain (don't ask me how this one works, I just know that people like it).

Using Python-TUF, but it's purpose is not to package app, check new version and apply updates and patches, so a non negligible layer of development is needed to achieve the same work as the first choices.

Confusingly named, it’s not a framework, but a specification that developers can follow when implementing their update systems to help users know they can trust the updates they receive. There’s also a Python reference implementation.

Hello world! I want to recommend a wonderful open-source package called Tufup. It's a simple software updater for stand-alone Python applications. This package was created as a replacement for PyUpdater, given the fact that PyUpdater has been archived and is no longer maintained. However, whereas PyUpdater implements a custom security mechanism to ensure authenticity (and integrity) of downloaded update files, Tufup is built on top of the security mechanisms implemented in the python-tuf package, a.k.a. TUF (The Update Framework). By entrusting the design of security measures to security professionals, Tufup can focus on high-level tools.