Swift: A Fast Dynamic Packet Filter

This paper presents Swift, a packet filter for high performance packet capture on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The key features of Swift include extremely low filter update latency for dynamic packet filtering, and Gbps high-speed packet processing. Based on Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), Swift achieves the former with an instruction set design that avoids the need for compilation and security checking, and the latter by mainly utilizing SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). The authors implement Swift in the Linux 2.6 kernel for both i386 and x86 64 architectures.