Patent ID: 8239950

Claim:
A method for virus processing, the method comprising: receiving, by a general purpose processor, a data segment, the general purpose processor communicably coupled to a virus processing hardware accelerator; causing, by the general purpose processor, the data segment to be stored to a first memory; directing, by the general purpose processor, the virus processing hardware accelerator to perform a virus scan of the data segment based on one or more virus signatures stored in a second memory, the virus processing hardware accelerator communicably coupled to the first memory via a first memory interface and to the second memory via a second memory interface, wherein the first memory includes a first virus signature compiled for execution on the general purpose processor, wherein the second memory includes the one or more virus signatures, which are compiled for execution on the virus processing hardware accelerator, and wherein each of the one or more virus signatures include at least one primitive instruction and at least one Content Pattern Recognition (CPR) instruction stored at contiguous locations in the second memory; and wherein the CPR instruction is one of an instruction set including a compare string instruction, a compare buffer instruction, a perform checksum instruction, a seek instruction and a test instruction.