21. The security appliance of claim 19 wherein the processor is further configured to determine a start offset of the given regular expression pattern upon walking the sequence of characters through the rNFA graph.
21. The security appliance of claim 19 wherein the processor is further configured to determine a start offset of the given regular expression pattern upon walking the sequence of characters through the rNFA graph. 22. The security appliance of claim 21 wherein the processor is further configured to mark an offset of the last character accepted by the rNFA graph as the start offset of the given regular expression pattern and reporting the start offset.