An Anomaly Intrusion Detection System Employing Associative String Processor

The genetic material that encodes the unique characteristics of each individual, such as gender, eye color, and other human features is the well-known Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In this work, we introduce an anomaly intrusion detection system, built on the notion of a DNA sequence or gene, which is responsible for the normal network traffic patterns. Subsequently, the system detects suspicious activities by searching the “normal behavior DNA sequence” through string matching. Conversely, string matching is a computationally intensive. As a result, we adopt a monitoring phase that is hardware implemented with the intention that DNA pattern matching is performed at wire-speed. Finally, we provide the details of our Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of the bioinformatics-based string matching technique. We show that the proposed micro-architecture can handle fixed-length patterns at a rate of more than one character per cycle.