Hardware architecture for the fast pattern matching

As the speed of current computer networks increases, it is necessary to protect networks by security systems such as firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) operating at multigigabit speeds. As attacks on modern networks became more and more complex, it is necessity to detect attack placed not only in single packet but at the level of network flows. Pattern matching in the network flows is the time-critical operation of many modern IDS. Most of the regularly used patterns are described by the regular expression. This work describes advanced hardware architecture for the fast regular expression matching based on the perfect hashing. The proposed architecture is scalable and can achieve multigigabit throughput per network flow.