Multilevel Pattern Matching Architecture for Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention System.

Pattern matching is one of the most performance critical components in network intrusion detection and prevention system, which needs to be accelerated by carefully designed architectures. In this paper, we present a highly parameterized multilevel pattern matching architecture (MPM), which is implemented on FPGA by exploiting redundant resources among patterns for less chip area. In practice, MPM can be partitioned to several pipelines for high frequency. This paper also presents a pattern set compiler that can generate RTL codes of MPM with the given pattern set and predefined parameters. One MPM architecture is generated by our compiler based on Snort rules on Xilinx FPGA. The results show that MPM can achieve 4.3Gbps throughput with only 0.22 slices per character, about one half chip area than the most area-efficient architecture in literature. MPM can be parameterized potential for more than 100 Gbps throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]