Packets in an intrusion prevention system are inspected by a deep packet inspection engine. A packet may be queued for transmission onto an output queue and transmitted over a network while deep packet inspection is still being performed on the packet. Such simultaneous inspection processing and transmission may be implemented using two ownership bits for the packet, one to indicate “ownership to process” and one to indicate “ownership to send,” instead of the single ownership bit that is used in conventional systems. Furthermore, the packet may be inspected, queued onto the output queue, and transmitted without making a copy of the packet within the deep packet inspection engine. These techniques enable the inspection latency, and therefore the overall transmission latency, of packets to decrease, thereby improving the overall performance of the intrusion prevent system.