Management Software for a Hardware Regular Expression Match Engine

Abstract

Nowadays, intrusion detection is an essential part of the network systems. Pattern matching is a core operation of intrusion detection. Some of the patterns are specified as regular expression. The common way to perform regular expression matching is using finite automaton (FA). There are two kinds of FAs, one is Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) and the other is Non-deterministic Finite Automaton (NFA). DFA can provide constant throughput however it has the state explosion problem. NFA doesn't have state explosion problem but it is relatively slow compared to DFA. A hardware accelerator based on NFA is thus feasible. In this report, management software is built for a hardware regular expression match engine. This match engine is a hardware accelerator which is based on NFA methods. The software is used to convert the regular expressions to data structures required by MX-NFA. The software converts or rewrites the regular expression if necessary.