Offloading IDS Computation to the GPU

Signature-matching intrusion detection systems can experience significant decreases in performance when the load on the IDS-host increases. We propose a solution that off-loads some of the computation performed by the IDS to the graphics processing unit (GPU). Modern GPUs are programmable, stream-processors capable of high-performance computing that in recent years have been used in non-graphical computing tasks. The major operation in a signature-matching IDS is matching values seen operation to known black-listed values, as such, our solution implements the string-matching on the GPU. The results show that as the CPU load on the IDS host system increases, PixelSnort´s performance is significantly more robust and is able to outperform conventional Snort by up to 40%