Virus Detection Processor using Pipeline Architecture for Embedded Network Security

Network security has always been an important issue for data communication. End users are vulnerable to virus attacks, spam, and Trojan horses. Contemporary network security applications generally require the ability to perform powerful pattern matching to protect against attacks such as viruses and spam. Traditional hardware solutions are intended for firewall routers. However, the solutions in the literature for firewalls are not scalable, and they do not address the difficulty of an antivirus with an ever-larger pattern set. Because the firewall routers only focus on the application layer of the OSI model and they require high transmission speed. To achieve the high speed transmission, a pattern matching processor (also called as virus detection processor) is developed. The aim of the work is to provide a systematic virus detection hardware solution for network security for embedded systems. Instead of placing entire matching patterns on a chip, the solution is a two-phase dictionary-based antivirus processor that works by condensing as much of the important filtering information as possible onto a chip and infrequently accessing off-chip data to make the matching mechanism scalable to large pattern sets.