Lockheed Martin Corporation

Eric C Lett

Michael C Dapp

Sai Lun Ng

Signatures of character strings in a document which may indicate a possible intrusion into or attack on a networked computer system or node thereof or other security breach are detected at high speed using a hardware accelerator within the environment of a hardware parser accelerator. An interrupt or exception can thus be issued to a host CPU before a command which may constitute such a security breach, intrusion or attack can be made executable by parsing of a document. The CPU can initiate network control measures to prevent or limit the intrusion.

Intrusion detection accelerator

A hardware accelerated validation parser is provided to remove a large portion if not all of the processing and overhead burden of validation parsing from a host processor by parallel access to both a state table and a data dictionary based on a token and merging and selective redirection of the respective outputs thereof; a portion of a transition control word (TCW) formed by the merged data being used to advance through the state table and a portion of the TCW being used to control formation of a tree structured data object (TSDO) corresponding to a text document in a language such as XML&#x2122; which supports interoperability and platform independence. A stack is provided to accommodate nesting of elements and aggregate elements. The formation of the TSDO can be and preferably is performed asynchronously and autonomously in parallel with the validation parsing.

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Endwell, NY, United States of America

Eric C Lett