The development of network technology reveals the clear trend that mobile devices will soon be equipped with more and more network-based functions and services. This increase also results in more intrusions and attacks on mobile devices; therefore, mobile security mechanisms are becoming indispensable. In this paper, we propose a novel signature matching scheme for mobile security. This scheme not only emphasizes a small resource requirement and an optimal scan speed, which are both important for resource-limited mobile devices, but also focuses on practical features such as stable performance, fast signature set updates and hardware implementation. This scheme is based on the finite state machine (FSM) approach widely used for string matching. An SRAM-based two-level finite state machine (TFSM) solution is introduced to utilize the unbalanced transition distribution in the original FSM to decrease the memory requirement, and to shorten the critical path of the single-FSM solution. By adjusting the boundary of the two FSMs, optimum memory usage and throughput are obtainable. The hardware circuit of our scheme is designed and evaluated by both FPGA and ASIC technology. The result of FPGA evaluation shows that 2,168 unique patterns with a total of 32,776 characters are stored in 177.75 KB SelectRAM blocks of Xilinx XC4VLX40 FPGA and a 3.0 Gbps throughput is achieved. The result of ASIC evaluation with 180 nm-CMOS library shows a throughput of over 4.5 Gbps with 132 KB of SRAM. Because of the small amount of memory and logic cell requirements, as well as the scalability of our scheme, higher performance is achieved by instantiating several signature matching engines when more resources are provided.