BlackBerry Helps U.S. Government Vendors Comply with New Software Bill of Materials Mandate

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 5, 2022

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) today introduced a new feature of BlackBerry® Jarvis®, the company's software composition analysis tool, that enables those doing business with the U.S. Federal Government to comply with the recent software bill of materials (SBOM) requirement from President Biden's Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity.

Executive Order 14028 requires any vendor, supplier, or provider of technology solutions to the U.S. government to provide a full SBOM and demonstrate other cybersecurity management measures to ensure that any security vulnerabilities in the software supply chain of the nation's critical infrastructure are identified and remediated immediately.

In response to the new standard, BlackBerry QNX has added a specific capability to BlackBerry Jarvis that enables users to efficiently generate a comprehensive SBOM report that follows the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX®) report standard, one of the leading standards to support the U.S. government and other regulatory bodies. Available in early 2022, BlackBerry Jarvis will become one of the first software composition analysis tools to provide this key feature to embedded software developers whose products are used by the Federal Government. This will empower these developers to keep software secure from all known issues based on the speedy and actionable intelligence provided by the tool.

"As multiple government and vertical-specific safety and security standards emerge, the need to have confidence in one's codebase has taken on a new level of importance, particularly during a time in which multiple cybersecurity attacks have illustrated vulnerabilities present within the digital infrastructure of the U.S. Federal Government," said Adam Boulton, Chief Technology Officer, BlackBerry Technology Solutions. "BlackBerry Jarvis enables embedded software developers to demonstrate compliance, track software quality metrics and continuously harden their system so that it becomes more resilient to increasingly cunning attacks. With BlackBerry Jarvis' new ability to generate an SBOM report in the U.S. government's mandated format, it's now become an even more invaluable tool to procurement officers tasked with managing the nation's cybersecurity and software supply chain risk."

"BlackBerry Jarvis meets the needs of the embedded software industry, allowing developers to gain deep visibility into the provenance of their software while automating the key steps in the binary scanning process in order to produce an SBOM in just minutes," said Hiten Shah, Senior Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Complying with this specific requirement in Biden's Cybersecurity Executive Order is something which policymakers around the globe will no doubt roll out with ever more frequency in the face of a threat landscape that only seems to be growing in scale and complexity. To that end, BlackBerry Jarvis helps OEMs bring trust, transparency and above all – peace of mind – into their software supply chains."