Increasing the power efficiency of Bloom filters for network string matching

Although software based techniques are widely accepted in computer security systems, there is a growing interest to utilize hardware opportunities in order to compensate for the network bandwidth increases. Recently, hardware based virus protection systems have started to emerge. This type of hardware systems work by identifying the malicious content and removing it from the network streams. In principle, they make use of string matching. Bit by bit, they compare the virus signatures with the bit strings in the network. The bloom filters are ideal data structures for string matching. Nonetheless, they consume large power when many of them used in parallel to match different virus signatures. In this paper, we propose a new type of Bloom filter architecture which exploits well-known pipelining technique