Hybrid Memory Architecture for Regular Expression Matching

Regular expression matching has been widely used in Network Intrusion Detection Systems due to its strong expressive power and flexibility. To match multiple regular expression patterns simultaneously, compiling multiple regular expressions into a composite DFA is an intuitive and efficient way. However, traditional memory architecture suffers from the problem of memory explosion for certain complex regular expressions. In this paper, we propose a hybrid memory architecture which inserts marginal logic elements to improve the ability of traditional memory architecture to deal with complex regular expressions. The experimental results demonstrate a significant memory reduction for complex regular expressions.