LA3000 Regular Expression Silicon IP and Automata SDK

Lionic LA3000 Regex Silicon IP

The Lionic LA3000 is a regex (regular expression) silicon IP designed for DPI (deep packet inspection). Nowadays, supporting layer-7 application has become a demanding requirement for current security/content-aware network equipment. Many of such applications rely on DPI to achieve their functionality, such as anti-virus, intrusion prevention system, traffic classification and so on.

The function of LA3000 is MPSE (Multi-Pattern Search Engine) which supports both regular expression and plain string patterns. That is, LA3000 is able to search millions of pattens (only limited by memory) in memory simultaneously. It utilizes our patented technologies to provide excellent performance with minimal memory usage and signature maintenance requirements.

Key Features

• Up to 2.5Gbps of executing any amount(only limited by memory) of regular expression rules
• Two types of content inspection engine for application
  • FA (Finite Automata) engine for processing Regular Expression
  • PFAC (Pre-Filter Aho Corasick) engine for processing Plain String
• Support Max 12 Parallel Content Inspection Engines
• Support Max 256 independent pattern sets for various applications
• Support Max 4 million patterns per pattern set
• Less memory footprint
  • Compressed finite automata consumes less memory(Patented in USA and several countries).
  • Supports special regular expression syntax with hardware circuit(Patented in USA and several countries).
• Efficient content inspection that extends across packet boundaries with minimal overhead
• Compatible AXI v3 and v4 specification

Lionic Automata SDK

Lionic Automata SDK is the software companion of LA3000 Silicon IP. It includes the regular expression / plain strings compiler and simulator. The LA3000 and Automata SDK must be working together.

The Automata SDK compiler can read both types of patterns and compile them into a search graph. We named this search graph as “Inspection Code”. It is a machine readable format. Then the “Inspection Code” is downloading into LA3000 for performing the multi-pattern searching.

The Automata SDK simulator is developed with the same algorithms of LA3000. User may check the above “Inspection Code” with test patterns on PC before downloading it into LA3000.

Lionic RE-Soft

There is a software counterpart of LA3000 which we named it as RE-Soft. It means “Regular Expression Software”. The functionalities of RE-Soft are all the same as the hardware accelerated LA3000. It provides the same APIs as the Lionic Universal Driver Interface.

For the platform without the hardware accelerated LA3000, Lionic can still provides all the same function by RE-Soft. The Lionic DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) solutions like anti-virus, intrusion prevention, application identification and so on can utilize either the hardware LA3000 or the software RE-Soft.

LA3000 Application Areas

The application areas of LA3000 include but not limit to the following areas -

• Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW)
• Anti-Virus (AV)
• Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
• Application Identification
• Device Identification
• The Application based QoS feature inside the SD-WAN
• Smart NICs
• DDoS Mitigation
• Network Monitoring
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
• Grammar based Content Processing
• URL, Spam and Adware filtering
• Advanced auditing and policing of user/application security policies
• Financial data mining - parsing of streamed financial feeds
• Memory Introspection
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Sentiment Analysis
• Big Data database acceleration (Spark, Hadoop, etc.)
• Computational Storage