Functional verification of signature detection architectures for high speed network applications

Abstract

To meet the future internet traffic challenges, enhancement of hardware architectures related to network security has vital role where software security algorithms are incompatible with high speed in terms of Giga bits per second (Gbps). In this paper, we discuss signature detection technique (SDT) used in network intrusion detection system (NIDS). Design of most commonly used hardware based techniques for signature detection such as finite automata, discrete comparators, Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm, content addressable memory (CAM) and Bloom filter are discussed. Two novel architectures, XOR based pre computation CAM (XPCAM) and multi stage look up technique (MSLT) Bloom filter architectures are proposed and implemented in third party field programmable gate array (FPGA), and area and power consumptions are compared. 10Gbps network traffic generator (TNTG) is used to test the functionality and ensure the reliability of the proposed architectures. Our approach involves a unique combination of algorithmic and architectural techniques that outperform some of the current techniques in terms of performance, speed and powerefficiency.