The Contrast Graph

Real-time application security data model that continuously maps, updates and correlates security insights across applications, APIs and infrastructure. 

Organizations often manage application security through isolated tools that offer fragmented, static views of risk. This results in lengthy lists of theoretical problems lacking the context needed to understand business impact. The Contrast Graph solves this by creating a real-time, digital twin of your application layer. 

This unified intelligence fuels the platform’s most critical workflows, enabling teams to automate remediation, trace active attacks and measure actual risk with the Contrast Score.

Unifying application security with the Contrast Graph

The Contrast Graph transforms scattered security insights into a unified, living map of the entire software ecosystem. By continuously correlating applications, APIs, libraries and infrastructure, it provides deep context unmatched in the industry. This dynamic model links vulnerabilities to active threats, business criticality and prioritization, delivering a cohesive, actionable picture of your true exposure.

The Contrast Graph in action: The Contrast Score

Static CVSS scores alone create noise. The Contrast Graph creates clarity. By feeding real-time production context directly into the scoring engine, we transform theoretical severity into a dynamic, reality-based risk rating.

Instead of relying on a static base score, the Contrast Score dynamically adjusts severity based on live telemetry — including factors such as vulnerability reachability, business criticality and active attack status. This delivers a precise, reality-based risk rating that empowers teams to ignore the noise and fix the true threats.

Revolutionizing application security workflows

• Deep vulnerability insight for rapid incident response: Quickly understand the cause and impact of any attack with the enriched data from the Contrast Graph. This includes architectural, threat and business context directly measured from production environments, enabling teams to decide on an efficient and effective response. 
• Confidently manage real vulnerabilities: Each vulnerability is proven exploitable at runtime, mapped to entry points and data flows, and scored based on real-world exploitability and business impact. The Contrast Graph shows exactly how an attacker could exploit an issue.
• Context-rich application security training: The Contrast Graph enables developers to get instant full-context feedback they can trust, rather than waiting for scans only to learn many are false positives. This reduces the number of vulnerabilities being created and cuts the cost of finding and fixing vulnerabilities downstream.

How the Contrast Graph works

The Contrast Graph is a digital twin of application layer security constructed by observing applications and APIs while they run.

• Integrated threat sensors
  Lightweight sensors installed on application and API servers, automatically observing security behavior. These sensors collect data to build the Contrast Graph, using open telemetry and scalable methods for near-zero performance impact.
• Streaming data architecture
  Sensor data flows through a modern streaming data architecture where it is analyzed, updated and merged into the Contrast Graph. This highly scalable approach seamlessly supports millions of applications and APIs in real-time.
• Sophisticated graph model
  This allows modeling of complex enterprise architecture, correlation of vulnerabilities and attacks, dynamic contextual risk scoring and much more. It includes apps, APIs, attack surface, runtime behavior, defenses, vulnerabilities, attacks, connections, infrastructure and ownership.
• Dynamic risk scoring
  The Contrast Graph automatically calculates risk scores using production context — scores are enriched with asset criticality, exploitability, threat intelligence, business value, and even active attacks — to ensure focus is on what truly matters. 

The missing link that provides a holistic view of the application and API ecosystem

While organizations may have visibility into their network, cloud, containers and other infrastructure, the critical activity at the application layer often remains invisible. The Contrast Graph emerges as the missing link, providing understanding across these complex layers. By tagging everything in the Contrast Graph with identifiers, it serves as a bridge that enables correlation between application and infrastructure layers for a truly holistic view of security risks. 

The Contrast Graph is the foundation for AI-powered workflows across the Contrast runtime security platform. By maintaining a continuously updated, real-world model of application behavior, the Graph enables advanced capabilities like Contrast AI SmartFix, which generates precise, AI-crafted remediation pull requests complete with test cases. Contrast MCP Server enables agentic workflows to pull data from other tools and gain insight across development, security and operations. 

Together, Contrast AI SmartFix and Contrast MCP Server, transforms the Contrast Graph from a data model into an intelligent engine for proactive, scalable security. The future of application security isn't about running more scans; it's about empowering DevSecOps teams with the information they need to work together and efficiently defend their enterprise.