A hybrid finite automaton for practical deep packet inspection

  • Michela Becchi
  • , Patrick Crowley

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Deterministic finite automata (DFAs) are widely used to perform regular expression matching in linear time. Several techniques have been proposed to compress DFAs in order to reduce memory requirements. Unfortunately, many realworld IDS regular expressions include complex terms that result in an exponential increase in number of DFA states. Since all recent proposals use an initial DFA as a startingpoint, they cannot be used as comprehensive regular expression representations in an IDS. In this work we propose a hybrid automaton which addresses this issue by combining the benefits of deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata. We test our proposal on Snort rule-sets and we validate it on real traffic traces. Finally, we address and analyze the worst case behavior of our scheme and compare it to traditional ones.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 2007 ACM CoNEXT Conference - 3rd International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event2007 ACM CoNEXT Conference - 3rd International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT - New York, NY, United States
Duration: Dec 10 2007Dec 13 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings of 2007 ACM CoNEXT Conference - 3rd International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT

Conference

Conference2007 ACM CoNEXT Conference - 3rd International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York, NY
Period12/10/0712/13/07

Keywords

  • Deep packet inspection
  • DFA
  • NFA
  • Regular expressions

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