EU Cyber Resilience Act for container images: SBOM, VEX and 24-hour reporting
Short answer
Under the EU Cyber Resilience Act, manufacturers must report actively exploited vulnerabilities within 24 hours from 11 September 2026, and keep a machine-readable SBOM for products by December 2027. For images: generate an SPDX or CycloneDX SBOM per release, watch for KEV-listed CVEs, and use VEX to state which findings do not affect you.
| Date | Obligation | Container practice |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Sep 2026 | report actively exploited vulnerabilities (24 h) | alerts on new KEV CVEs in images you ship |
| 11 Dec 2027 | SBOM and vulnerability handling for products | SPDX 2.3 / CycloneDX 1.6 per image digest |
- 01SBOMper digest
- 02WatchKEV, daily
- 03Alertwithin hours
- 04VEXnot affected, with reason
Questions
Which SBOM format should I use?
Either SPDX 2.3 or CycloneDX 1.6; both are machine-readable and accepted. OCImend exports both.
Sources
More guides
- How to build FIPS-enabled containers (FIPS 140-3)
- OCImend FIPS containers: what you get and how they are verified
- How to fix container image CVEs automatically
- A container vulnerability pipeline that ends in a fix, not a report
- "No fix available": what to do about unfixable container CVEs
- Base image or your layers? Finding which Dockerfile step introduced a CVE