Minos: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Provenance-Based Backward Tracking

Abstract

Sophisticated cyber attacks, particularly Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), require effective post-intrusion forensic analysis. Provenance-based backward tracking reconstructs attack scenarios by tracing causality from security alerts, but existing methods rely on low-level statistical features and rigid traversal strategies, limiting their ability to capture high-level adversarial intent and suffering from dependency explosion. We present Minos, a multi-agent framework that formulates backward tracking as an LLM-driven reasoning process. Minos adopts a two-tiered architecture: for event-level analysis, it combines hierarchical context management, retrieval-augmented reasoning with citation verification, and adversarial deliberation to improve reasoning quality; for graph exploration, it coordinates four specialized agents under a finite state machine (FSM), replacing exhaustive traversal with hypothesis-guided reasoning and count-first query protocols to efficiently prune the search space. Experiments on 14 attack scenarios across five public datasets show that Minos achieves an average recall of 0.92 and precision of 0.64, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while producing attack subgraphs that are 49% more compact. Moreover, Minos generates interpretable reasoning throughout the tracking process, facilitating forensic auditing and system refinement. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-driven reasoning for automated provenance-based backward tracking.