Fighting Intrusions in Wireless LANs: A Need for the Reference Model

A traditional way to improve security of wired computer network can be achieved by applying access control policies to the front door of network. However these policies may be not sufficient and effective any more when applied to the wireless local area networks (WLANs). WLANs are different from the traditional wired LANs in terms of their exposure to potential threats, vulnerability and security techniques. Intrusions to WLANs are facts of the everyday life and handling them becomes more and more difficult. Currently there is no standardised reference model which may help to design, compare and evaluate the existing or future intrusion handling systems (IHSs) for WLANs. Analysis of the commercial IHSs shows that they all are built as a proprietary systems which are neither taking into consideration existence of other IHSs nor they are trying to find the ways to establish inter-IHS collaboration which may help to achieve better security for the end- users. Hence this paper starts by an analysis of the features of existing IHSs for WLANs, follows with proposing the new ways to enhance their design, and then is discussing development of such a novel reference model for a scalable distributed IHS architecture.