A system and method for intrusion detection and prevention processing are described. One or more states of a finite state automaton (FSA) stored in a memory may be compressed to form compressed state information. The FSA may include a set of states and defined state transitions for input characters. The compressed state information may include individual entries for the characters having a corresponding state transition to a next state, and a single entry for the values having a corresponding state transition to a common state. Context data may be searched using the compressed state information.