CAST Imaging components: an overview

Overview

CAST Imaging is a grouping of various components that work together to produce the results that allow you to investigate your application. This page provides an overview of the different components and how end users access them.

End-user entry point

There is one single point of entry for all users, whether Administrators, Application Owners or simply those that need to view analysis results: this is known as CAST Imaging and is accessed in a web browser. All actions are completed using this component:

  • application onboarding and scan
  • analysis configuration
  • extension management
  • deep analysis
  • result generation
  • result consumption

Technical components

These technical components are “invisible” to end-users but together they form the end-user entry point CAST Imaging:

Imaging Services

Imaging Services is the component providing the end-user access for application onboarding, analysis configuration/operation and result consumption. One single instance of this component is required and provided by default in both Microsoft Windows and Linux via Docker installers.

Internally, Imaging Services is implemented as a set of technical components that handle authentication, routing, configuration, and service orchestration. The components and their responsibilities are detailed below:

  • Auth Service - service responsible for validating authentication requests and enforcing access control to the underlying services. See Authentication.
  • SSO Service - Keycloak-based service providing single sign-on capabilities. See Authentication.
  • Control Panel - main backend service of the platform. It provides:
    • Centralized configuration value storage,
    • Service registration and discovery,
    • Coordination mechanisms allowing other components to communicate consistently.
  • Gateway - frontend gateway responsible for:
    • Redirecting unauthenticated users to the SSO Service when authentication is required,
    • Proxying and routing requests to the appropriate internal services.

Imaging Viewer

Imaging Viewer provides the main result consumption capabilities to the Imaging Services component. One single instance of this component is required and provided by default in both Microsoft Windows and Linux via Docker installers.

To deliver interactive and efficient result exploration, Imaging Viewer relies on multiple technical components responsible for data transformation, API exposure, AI features, and user interface rendering. These components and their roles are described below:

  • ETL - component responsible for extracting analyzed data from the PostgreSQL database, transforming it, and loading it into the Neo4j graph database used for visualization and navigation.
  • Imaging APIs - backend APIs designed for users or systems that do not rely on the CAST Imaging UI and need direct access to analysis data and results.
  • AI Service - component handling all AI-related capabilities, including:
    • Imaging chatbot interactions,
    • Transactional summaries,
    • Other AI-driven features.
  • Viewer Frontend (Microsoft Windows) - frontend service responsible for rendering all user interfaces and visual views on Windows-based deployments.
  • Viewer Backend (Windows) - backend service managing viewer-related tasks, data access, and interactions between the frontend and underlying services.
  • Viewer Server (Linux) - on Linux deployments, this component combines backend and frontend functionalities into a single service.

Analysis Node

This component provides the analysis capabilities to the Imaging Services component and consists of two sub-components:

  • CAST Imaging Core - the technical analysis “engine”
  • Node Service - a backend service dedicated to analysis execution.

It handles source code discovery and orchestrates the use of CAST Imaging Core and related components to perform in-depth technical analyses.

This component is compute-intensive and can be deployed in multiple instances to scale analysis capacity and distribute workloads. A node is usually a dedicated machine (physical or virtual) or container on which the two sub-components are installed.

Database

CAST Imaging requires an RDBMS component to store both the data generated during analyses and persistence data (settings/properties etc.). CAST supports only PostgreSQL as follows:

  • CAST Storage Service - a PostgreSQL instance packaged and provided by CAST for installation on Microsoft Windows with its own custom installer and pre-configured settings.
  • PostgreSQL - a standard installation direct on Linux, or through Docker, of an official PostgreSQL release.

There can be one or multiple instances of this component in a deployment. Multiple instances can be installed in order to load-balance your analysis and data storage requirements.