ASBOM: A CycloneDX Profile for Identity and Credential Posture in Agentic Systems

Abstract

Research paper proposing ASBOM, a CycloneDX profile for recording the identity and credential posture of an executing agentic composition: per-element execution identity, outbound identity bindings, credential descriptors with custodian, storage, configured validity and presentation, approval gates per action scope, layered attribution claims, evidence pointers, gaps and coverage; a proposed native extension and a stock-compatible property encoding of the same logical record; the complete signed BOM (JSF/RFC 8785) as verification unit. Evaluation: property-level comparison with stock CycloneDX 1.7 (incl. cryptographic-material fields) and AgentRiskBOM (full text); schema and semantic conformance; consumer round-trip checked against the full profile (a pinned library preserves the encoded records but drops compositions, declarations and the signature); a documentation-based corpus of 32 configurations plus 3 source-derived ones with source and host evidence layers; three-valued operator queries under declared and observed evidence policies (mostly unknown: the sampled installation documentation does not establish the required properties); a controlled local deployment case with four arms in which the same queries return determinate answers; ablation with a transition table; later page snapshots; an independent jq+OpenSSL signature verifier. Concurrent independent work: AgentRiskBOM (arXiv:2606.21877, June 2026). Schema, code, tests, coded records, observations and snapshots are included; no secret values.