No Edges, No Verdict: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Declared Dependency Graphs in 78K SBOMs in the Wild

Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) are consumed not only as component inventories but as dependency graphs: vulnerability triage, reachability filtering, and impact analysis all traverse the edges an SBOM declares. We present the first large-scale characterization of the declared dependency graph across 78,612 real-world SBOM files from the Wild SBOMs dataset (77,092 parseable). We find that the population splits into three regimes: 52.9% of SBOMs declare no edges at all (failing the NTIA minimum-elements requirement of dependency relationships), 8.8% declare a dependency block yet leave the majority of components isolated (degenerate regime; among such SBOMs with at least 50 components the median orphan share is 93%, and our 11 Syft-generated container-image SBOMs fall in this regime at 95-98% orphans), and 38.3% form well-connected graphs. Edge emission is determined by the generator, not the described software (0%-100% no-edge rates across tools), and the specification-level mechanism for declaring graph incompleteness (CycloneDX compositions) is used by 0.10% of the population. We argue that in the first two regimes, the common consumer inference "no path implies unreachable" is an unsound closed-world conclusion drawn from a demonstrably incomplete artifact; in a production vulnerability-prioritization system, replacing the resulting veto with an explicit "unknown" level guarded by a degeneracy detector recovered KEV recall from 0.600 to 0.950 (controlled re-scoring; 0.957 in a live end-to-end run) without alert flooding. We release our streaming scanner and the full per-SBOM topology dataset.