Enabling Efficient Attack Investigation via Human-in-the-Loop Security Analysis

System auditing is a vital technique for collecting system call events as system provenance and investigating complex multi-step attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threats. However, existing attack investigation methods struggle to uncover long attack sequences due to the massive volume of system provenance data and their inability to focus on attack-relevant parts. In this paper, we present Provexa, a defense system that enables human analysts to effectively analyze large-scale system provenance to reveal multi-step attack sequences. Provexa introduces an expressive domain-specific language, ProvQL, that offers essential primitives for various types of attack analyses (e.g., attack pattern search, attack dependency tracking) with user-defined constraints, enabling analysts to focus on attack-relevant parts and iteratively sift through the large provenance data. Moreover, Provexa provides an optimized execution engine for efficient language execution. Our extensive evaluations on a wide range of attack scenarios demonstrate the practical effectiveness of Provexa in facilitating timely attack investigation. The source code, data, and other artifacts have been made available at https://github.com/peng-gao-lab/Provexa .