A parallel automaton string matching with pre-hashing and root-indexing techniques for content filtering coprocessor

Abstract

We propose a new parallel automaton string matching approach and its hardware architecture for content filtering coprocessor. This new approach can improve the average matching time of the parallel automaton with pre-hashing and root-indexing techniques. The pre-hashing technique uses a hashing function to verify quickly the text against the partial patterns in the automaton, and the root-indexing technique matches multiple bytes for the root state in one single matching. A popular automaton algorithm, Aho-Corasick (AC) is chosen to be implemented by adding the two techniques; we employ these two techniques in a memory efficient version of AC namely bitmap AC. For the average-case time, our approach improves bitmap AC by 494% and 224% speedup for URL and virus patterns, respectively. Since pre-hashing and root-indexing techniques can be concurrently executed with bitmap AC in the hardware, our proposed approach has the same worst-case time as bitmap AC.