Architecture of the application

The OpenCTI platform relies on several external databases and services in order to work.

The GraphQL API

The API is the central part of the OpenCTI platorm, allowing the clients (including the frontend) to interact with the databases and the brokers. Built in NodeJS, it implements the GraphQL query language. As the API has not a full documentation for the moment, you can explore the available methods and parameters through a GraphQL playground. An example is available on the demonstration instance.

The write workers

The workers are standalone Python processes that just consume messages from the RabbitMQ broker in order to do asynchroneous write queries. You can launch as many workers as you need to increase the write performances.

Since Grakn 1.6.1, there is no more race conditions on duplicate keys, so we strongly advise you to launch more than one worker.

The connectors

The connectors are third-party softwares (Python processes) that can play 4 different roles on the platform:

Type	Description	Examples
EXTERNAL_IMPORT	Pull data from remote sources, convert it to STIX2 and insert it on the OpenCTI platform.	MITRE, MISP, CVE, AlienVault, FireEye, etc.
INTERNAL_IMPORT_FILE	Extract data from files uploaded on OpenCTI trough the UI or the API.	Extract indicators from PDFs, STIX2 import, etc.
INTERNAL_ENRICHMENT	Listen for new OpenCTI entities or users requests, pull data from remote sources to enrich.	Enrichment of observables though external servies, entities updates, etc.
INTERNAL_EXPORT_FILE	Generate export from OpenCTI data, based on listing entities or one entity and its relations.	STIX2 export, PDF export, CSV list generation, etc.