A low power lookup technique for multi-hashing network applications

Many network security applications require large virus signature sets to be maintained, retrieved, and compared against the network streams. Software applications frequently fail to identify so many signatures through comparisons at very high network speeds. Bloom filters are one of the main multi-hashing schemes utilized in hardware to support this level of security. Nevertheless Bloom filters consume significant power to store, retrieve and lookup virus signatures owing to many hash function computations required to index to the memory. We present a novel lookup technique and architecture to decrease the power consumption of multi-hashing schemes, predominantly Bloom filters, in hardware. The theoretical analysis has shown that power gain achieved through new lookup technique can go up to 90%. Simulation results with three different classes of the hash functions embedded into the Bloom filter have indicated that power consumption of the Bloom filters can be considerably decreased by employing the low power lookup technique.