Guest Editorial Deep Packet Inspection: Algorithms, Hardware, and Applications

The thirteen articles in this special section explore the technology of deep packet inspection (DPI). DPI examines the content in packet payloads to search for signatures of network applications, signs of malicious activities, and leaks of sensitive information, rather than just examine packet headers for information such as IP addresses and port numbers. The inspection provides network devices with rich information of application protocol messages in packet payloads, and enables them to make intelligent decisions in packet processing based on the information. The papers are organized into the following four sections: (1) Scalable Algorithms and Architectures for DPI, (2) Network Traffic Analysis with DPI, (3) Network Protocol Identification with DPI, and (4) Network Security Analysis with DPI.