An ASIC for SMTP Intrusion Prevention System

Email is one of the most important applications in communication. Due to the convenience and importance of emails, SMTP attack and spam mail have become the most serious problems in email service. A single security technique is not enough to protect the email system from attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware-based design of the SMTP intrusion prevention system (IPS) with virus detection engine. The SMTP IPS is based on stateful protocol anomaly detection and high speed virus detection. It forms an unified threat management (UTM) to the email system. The ASIC of SMTP IPS can supports at least 4.12 Gbps for parallel detection of SMTP and virus attack.