Boundary Hash for Memory-Efficient Deep Packet Inspection

Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (NIDPSs) are critical for network security. The Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) operation consumes a significant amount of resources in NIDPS. This is because to detect malicious activity DPI searches a database of signatures for each byte of every packet. In this paper, the authors develop a highly space-efficient data structure for hardware realization of Minimal Perfect Hash Functions (MPHFs). This data structure is simple to construct, requires 7n bits to represent the MPHF for a set of n keys and allows high-speed DPI.