Efficient FPGA-based regular expression pattern matching

Badii, A., Adetoye, A., Patel, D. and Hameed, K. (2008) Efficient FPGA-based regular expression pattern matching. In: European and Mediterranean conference on information systems 2008 (EMCIS 2008), Al Bostan Rotana, Dubai, UAE.

Abstract/Summary

An approach to the automatic generation of efficient Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) circuits for the Regular Expression-based (RegEx) Pattern Matching problems is presented. Using a novel design strategy, as proposed, circuits that are highly area-and-time-efficient can be automatically generated for arbitrary sets of regular expressions. This makes the technique suitable for applications that must handle very large sets of patterns at high speed, such as in the network security and intrusion detection application domains. We have combined several existing techniques to optimise our solution for such domains and proposed the way the whole process of dynamic generation of FPGAs for RegEX pattern matching could be automated efficiently.