Deterministic Finite Automata for pattern matching in FPGA for intrusion detection

Intrusion detection has been at the center of intense research in the last decade owing to the rapid increase of sophisticated attacks on computer systems. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) detect and prevent numerous security threats in network traffic. Recent Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) use regular expressions to represent suspicious or malicious character sequences in packet payloads in a more efficient way. They require high-speed packet processing providing a challenging case study for pattern matching using regular expressions. This paper presents an efficient method for finding matches to a given regular expression in a given text using FPGAs. This paper introduces a Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) method of hardware implementation to support regular expressions.