A hardware-efficent multi-character string matching architecture using brute-force algorithm

Due to the growth of network environment complexity, the necessity of packet payload inspection at application layer is increased. String matching, which is critical to network intrusions detection systems, inspects packet payloads and detects malicious network attacks using a set of rules. Because string matching is a computationally intensive task, hardware based string matching is required. In this paper, we propose a hardware-efficient string matching architecture using the brute-force algorithm. A process element that organizes the proposed architecture is optimized by reducing the number of the comparators. The performance of the proposed architecture is nearly equal to a previous work. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture with any process width reduces the comparator requirements in comparison with the previous work.