High performance string matching for security applications

Abstract

Aho-Corasick (AC) algorithm is a commonly used string matching algorithm. It performs multiple patterns matching for computer and network security applications. These applications impose high computational requirements, thus efficient parallelization of the AC algorithm is crucial. In this paper, we present a multi-stream based parallelization approach for the string matching using the AC algorithm on the latest Nvidia Kepler architecture. Our approach efficiently utilizes the HyperQ feature of the Kepler GPU so that multiple steams generated from a number of OpenMP threads running on the host multicore processor can be efficiently executed on a large number of fine-grain processing cores of the GPU. Experimental results show that our approach delivers up to 585Gbps throughput performance on Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU.