A Concise Review of FPGA-Based Hardware Solutions for Network Intrusion Detection

A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is an important part of the state-of-the-art information security systems. Searching network traffic for a large set of signatures, NIDS perform a computationally intensive task of multi-pattern string matching. Because traditional software alone approaches can no longer meet the high throughput of today's networking, hardware solutions are proposed to accelerate this task. Reconfigurable devices of type Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) have become increasingly popular for this purpose, because they combine the flexibility of software and high performance of hardware due to powerful possibilities of paralleling. This paper provides a succinct overview of the most promising approaches by analyzing numerous researches on methods and techniques for building signature-based NIDS using FPGA hardware platform.