Protecting Smart-Grid with Breno-Silva fast single pattern match algorithm for small patterns

Security of future Electrical power supply and the Smart-Grid will rely on the integrity of the communication network and in particular the Internet. Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is crucial to guard against malicious and intentional attacks. Network packet search and string processing tasks in high-speed networks are critical for secure IPS performance. Slower algorithms could mean a portion of the packets could have been bypassed and slip through the protective border, which leads to security vulnerability. A novel pattern matching algorithm is proposed in this paper and the new algorithm has worst, best, and average time complexities of O(n + 2m), O(2m), and O(n + m) respectively - when applied for large alphabets - while searching a m bytes pattern on a text of n bytes. Experiments on 256-bytes alphabet |Σ| text files have been conducted to compare the performance of the new algorithm with other alternatives. In all tests, the proposed algorithm has demonstrated an improved performance of at least 50% better on the mentioned alphabet size.