Abstract: The techniques disclosed herein enable systems to offload deep packet inspection tasks to a network interface card. This is accomplished by configuring the network interface card with a configuration file. The configuration file identifies target protocols, target fields, a number of packets to analyze for each target protocol, as well as identification tables that enable the network interface card to identify packet attributes. Once configured, the network interface card can receive and analyze incoming network packets. Accordingly, the network interface card extracts and parses values represented by the network packet in accordance with the parameters of the configuration file. The extracted values are compared against the entries of the identification table to derive an attribute identifier which can be returned to a network protocol stack. Moreover, the configuration file can also provide support for standard and non-standard network protocols.

Abstract: The techniques disclosed herein enable systems to offload deep packet inspection tasks to a network interface card. This is accomplished by configuring the network interface card with a configuration file. The configuration file identifies target protocols, target fields, a number of packets to analyze for each target protocol, as well as identification tables that enable the network interface card to identify packet attributes. Once configured, the network interface card can receive and analyze incoming network packets. Accordingly, the network interface card extracts and parses values represented by the network packet in accordance with the parameters of the configuration file. The extracted values are compared against the entries of the identification table to derive an attribute identifier which can be returned to a network protocol stack. Moreover, the configuration file can also provide support for standard and non-standard network protocols.