Deep Packet Inspection on Commodity Hardware using FastFlow

The analysis of packet payload is mandatory for network security and traffic monitoring applications. The computational cost of this activity pushed the industry towards hardware-assisted deep packet inspection (DPI) that have the disadvantage of being more expensive and less flexible. This paper covers the design and implementation of a new DPI framework using FastFlow, a skeleton-based parallel programming library targeting efficient streaming on multi-core architectures. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the DPI framework proposed, proving the feasibility to perform 10Gbit DPI analysis using modern commodity hardware.