Methodology for Fast Pattern Matching by Deterministic Finite Automaton with Perfect Hashing

As the speed of current computer networks increases, it is necessary to protect networks by security systems such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems operating at multigigabit speeds. Pattern matching is the time-critical operation of current IDS on multigigabit networks. Regular expressions are often used to describe malicious network patterns. This paper deals with fast regular expression matching using the deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with perfect hash function. We introduce decomposition of the problem on two parts: transformation of the input alphabet and usage of a fast DFA, and usage of perfect hashing to reduce space/speed tradeoff for DFA transition table.