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Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture where network control is decoupled from forwarding and is directly programmable. However, existing techniques provide limited support for stateful forwarding in SDN data plane. Relying on the controller for all state maintaining gives rise to scalability and performance issues. In this paper, we present Stateful Forwarding Abstraction (SFA) in SDN data plane. And we design a co-processing unit in SDN switches named Forwarding Processor (FP). It can deal with state infor-mation in data plane and its instructions can be flexibly extended to meet application requirements. Through SFA, we implement stateful network processing on the datapath which covers a full range of Layer 4 to Layer 7 services. We validate its performance based on IPsec. The experiment result proves that the forwarding effi-ciency is greatly improved.