Using GRID for Centralized Synthesis of FPGA-based Information Security Systems

Abstract

The functioning of such signature-based information security tools as network intrusion detection system, antivirus, anti-worms and others are based on solving in real time resource-intensive task of multi-pattern string matching. Due to rising traffic rates, increasing number and sophistication of attacks and the collapse of Moore's law, traditional software solutions can no longer keep up. Therefore, hardware approaches are frequently being used by developers to accelerate pattern matching. Reconfigurable FPGAbased devices, providing the flexibility of software and the near-ASIC performance, have become increasingly popular for this purpose. Signature databases of the current information security systems contain hundreds of thousands and even millions of rules. Every signature database update or change in network parameters forces the digital circuit of such system to be resynthesized, and the FPGA – to be reconfigured. To facilitate such reconfigurations we propose a centralized service for information security reconfigurable tools synthesis, which uses free high-performance resources of GRID infrastructure.