A Parallel Automaton string matching with Pre-Hashing and Root-Indexing techniques for content filtering coprocessor

We propose a new Parallel Automaton string matching approach and its hardware architecture for content filtering coprocessor. This new approach can improve the average matching time of the Parallel Automaton with Pre-Hashing and Root-Indexing techniques. The Pre-Hashing technique uses a hashing function to verify quickly the text against the partial patterns in the Automaton, and the Root-Indexing technique matches multiple bytes for the root state in one single matching. A popular Automaton algorithm, Aho-Corasick (AC) is chosen to be implemented by adding the two techniques; we employ these two techniques in a memory efficient version of AC namely Bitmap AC. For the average-case time, our approach improves Bitmap AC by 494% and 224% speedup for URL and Virus patterns, respectively. Since Pre-Hashing and Root-Indexing techniques can be concurrently executed with Bitmap AC in the hardware, our proposed approach has the same worst-case time as Bitmap AC.