Aspects of a method and system for efficient and cache-friendly TCP session lookup operations based on canonicalization tags are presented. Aspects of the method may include searching a plurality of tag fields, retrieved via a single memory read operation, to locate a reference to a control block that includes context information for a communication session. Aspects of the system may include a processor that searches a plurality of tag fields, retrieved via a single memory read operation, to locate a reference to a control block that includes context information for a communication session.