Abstract: A jumping window based fast pattern matching method using TCAM includes TCAM entries containing all possible sub-patterns independent of position. Due to these sub-patterns, the method can search for all patterns appearing within the window at once. If a match is not found, the method jumps to the next window (shift size of M bytes), opposed to the sliding window method that shifts to the next byte (shift size of 1 byte). This incurs a pattern match that is M times faster, despite requiring a larger TCAM size to be able to represent all possible redundant sub-patterns in the TCAM; here, M is the size of a jumping window. In addition, the present invention employs a two-phase pattern matching sequence for a large number of long patterns such as virus and worm signatures. In the first phase, the fixed prefix will be searched with TCAM; then, only the CRC value for the remaining pattern is examined to confirm the existence of the entire pattern.