An improved DFA for fast regular expression matching

  • Authors:
  • Domenico Ficara;Stefano Giordano;Gregorio Procissi;Fabio Vitucci;Gianni Antichi;Andrea Di Pietro

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy;University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Modern network devices need to perform deep packet inspection at high speed for security and application-specific services. Finite Automata (FAs) are used to implement regular expressions matching, but they require a large amount of memory. Many recent works have proposed improvements to address this issue. This paper presents a new representation for deterministic finite automata (orthogonal to previous solutions), called Delta Finite Automata (δFA), which considerably reduces states and transitions and requires a transition per character only, thus allowing fast matching. Moreover, a new state encoding scheme is proposed and the comprehensive algorithm is tested for use in the packet classification area.