A Novel Parallel Dual-Character String Matching Algorithm on Graphical Processing Units

Aho-Corasick algorithm has been widely used in network intrusion detection system to inspect network packets against thousands of attack patterns. To improve the performance of network intrusion detection systems, many variations of Aho-Corasick algorithm are proposed to accelerate multiple string matching on GPUs or dedicated hardware. One of the proposed variations is to increase the number of characters that are processed per cycle. However, increasing the number of characters processed per cycle will encounter two major problems. The first problem is the input alignment problem while the second problem is the large increase of memory required for storing the state transition table. The two problems cause the multi-character approach become less feasible. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel dual-character string matching algorithm on graphical processing units. In order to solve the two major problems, the proposed algorithm presents a new state machine to solve the input alignment problem, and compresses the state transition table using perfect hashing to solve the memory explosion problem. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of performance and memory requirements.