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, we develop a highly space-efficient data structure for hardware realization of minimal perfect hash functions (MPHFs). This data structure is simple to construct, requires 7 n bits to represent the MPHF for a set of n keys and allows high-speed DPI.