Multi-Agent Automation for Software Supply Chain Attestation and SLSA Compliance

Manual SBOM creation for complex applications is a multi-day, error-prone process. A custom multi-agent workflow automates component discovery across all build artifacts, package managers, and container layers, generating accurate, standards-compliant (SPDX, CycloneDX) SBOMs in minutes as part of every CI/CD pipeline run. This eliminates a major release bottleneck and provides continuous, up-to-date visibility.

Compiling evidence for SLSA levels 3+ requires correlating build logs, signatures, and provenance data across fragmented tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Artifactory). An orchestrated agent workflow automatically collects, signs, and stores tamper-proof attestations in a verifiable format (in-toto). This creates a permanent, queryable audit trail, slashing the cost and time of compliance reviews and customer security questionnaires.

Static, point-in-time compliance checks leave windows of exposure. An automated workflow continuously analyzes SBOMs against live vulnerability feeds (NVD, OSV) and enforces policy gates. Agents can block deployments with critical, unpatched dependencies or automatically trigger remediation workflows. This moves security from a final checklist to an active, integrated control layer, significantly reducing the risk of shipping known vulnerabilities.

A fully automated, SLSA-compliant pipeline is a tangible asset for enterprise sales and procurement. By providing machine-verifiable attestations and pristine SBOMs on demand, you demonstrate superior operational maturity and security governance. This builds trust in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, govtech) and can become a key factor in winning contracts where software supply chain integrity is non-negotiable.

A production-grade architecture uses specialized agents for provenance collection, cryptographic signing, policy evaluation, and storage. It integrates with enterprise identity for signing keys, secrets managers for token access, and observability platforms for monitoring attestation health. This moves beyond brittle scripts to a resilient, API-driven service that scales across thousands of repositories and build pipelines without increasing operational load.

Successful implementation starts with a pilot on a single CI system (e.g., GitHub Actions) and a core set of artifacts. Agents are deployed to generate SBOMs and attestations in a non-blocking 'report-only' mode. Governance is built in: signing keys are managed in HSMs, policy decisions are logged for audit, and human approval gates are maintained for critical production releases before moving to fully automated enforcement.

This specialized agent integrates directly into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) to capture immutable build provenance. It records the build environment, input sources, and compilation steps, generating in-toto attestations and signing them with a private key from a secure vault (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS). This creates a cryptographically verifiable chain of custody for every artifact, satisfying SLSA Level 2+ requirements for source and build integrity.

An agent that automatically generates CycloneDX or SPDX SBOMs for every build, integrating with SCA tools (Syft, Trivy, Snyk). It doesn't just list dependencies; it correlates them against live CVE feeds and internal policy databases to flag licenses (GPL, AGPL) and vulnerabilities that violate compliance gates. The agent enriches SBOMs with context from the provenance attestation, linking each component back to its exact source commit and build run.

This orchestration agent acts as the central policy decision point. It evaluates the signed attestations and enriched SBOMs against predefined SLSA levels and organizational security policies (e.g., 'no high-severity CVEs in runtime dependencies'). Using a rules engine (Open Policy Agent), it can automatically block artifact promotion to staging, fail CI pipelines, or create Jira tickets for exceptions that require human review, enforcing compliance as code.

A standalone verification agent operates in downstream environments (artifact registries, deployment pipelines) to validate attestations before artifact consumption. It checks digital signatures, verifies the provenance against a public key infrastructure, and ensures the SBOM matches the artifact contents. This provides continuous assurance for deployment tools (ArgoCD, Flux) and customers, creating an automated audit trail that drastically reduces manual compliance evidence collection.

When the policy gate flags a vulnerable dependency, this agent initiates an automated remediation workflow. It researches secure, compatible versions, generates a patched SBOM, and triggers a new, attested build via the CI system. For critical vulnerabilities, it can coordinate with the fix-generation agents from sibling workflows to propose code changes. All actions are logged back to the provenance record, maintaining a complete history of security interventions.

Not an agent, but a critical control plane component. This system aggregates telemetry from all agents—attestation success rates, policy violations, SBOM health scores—into a centralized dashboard (Grafana, custom). It provides real-time visibility into supply chain security posture, generates compliance reports for frameworks like SLSA and NIST SSDF, and alerts on anomalies like unsigned artifacts or unexpected dependency changes, enabling governance and continuous improvement.