Deflation DFA: Remembering History is Adequate

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for network devices to perform deep packet inspection (DPI) to enhance network security. In DPI the packet payload is compared against a set of predefined patterns which can be specified using regular expressions (regexes). It is well-known that mapping regexes to deterministic finite automata (DFA) will suffer from the state explosion problem. Through observation, we attribute DFA explosion to the necessity of remembering matching history. In this paper, we investigate how to record the matching history efficiently and propose an extended DFA approach for regex matching called fcq-FA, which can make a memory size reduction of about 1000 times with a fully automated approach. In fcq-FA, we use pipeline queues and counters to help recording the matching history. Hence, state explosion caused by Kleene closure and repetitions can be definitely avoided. Further, it achieves a fully automated signature compilation with polynomial running time and space.