Efficient Parallelization of Regular Expression Matching for Deep Inspection

Regular expression matching has been widely used in today's network security systems, where the payloads of network packets are matched against a set of rules specified by regular expressions. Due to the increasing number of rules and the complex semantics of regular expressions, state-of-the-art regular expression matching techniques hardly meet the demands of network development. The rapid growth of parallel technology calls for an efficient parallel regular expression matching method. In this paper, we propose ParaRegex, a novel approach for fast parallel regular expression matching with high efficiency and low overhead. ParaRegex is a framework that implements data- parallel regular expression matching for finite automaton based methods. Experimental evaluation shows that ParaRegex produces a high-performance regular expression matching engine with low memory overhead and linear speed-up ratio, and obtains up to 6 times faster processing speed on a commodity multi-core workstation.