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Published in Soewito, B., Vespa, L., Mahajan, A., Weng, N., & Wang, H. (2009). Self-addressable memory-based FSM: a scalable intrusion detection engine. IEEE Network, 23(1), 14-21. doi: 10.1109/MNET.2009.4804319 ©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

One way to detect and thwart a network attack is to compare each incoming packet with predefined patterns, also called an attack pattern database, and raise an alert upon detecting a match. This article presents a novel pattern-matching engine that exploits a memory-based, programmable state machine to achieve deterministic processing rates that are independent of packet and pattern characteristics. Our engine is a self-addressable memory-based finite state machine (SAMFSM), whose current state coding exhibits all its possible next states. Moreover, it is fully reconfigurable in that new attack patterns can be updated easily. A methodology was developed to program the memory and logic. Specifically, we merge "non-equivalent" states by introducing "super characters" on their inputs to further enhance memory efficiency without adding labels. SAM-FSM is one of the most storage-efficient machines and reduces the memory requirement by 60 times. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of SAM-FSM.

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