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.