Fast regular expression matching in hardware using NFA-BDD combination

Abstract

The development of Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) is nowadays a powerful solution to defend against various network security threats. There has been a lot of research effort devoted to hardware-based NIDS, because of (1) the massive amount of computation performed by regular expression matching algorithms and (2) the gigabit per second performance requirement of modern NIDS. Hardware-based NIDS take advantage of parallelization inherent in FPGAs, ASICs or network processors to support very high network speeds, while software approaches fail to do so.