Why we need a reference model for intrusion handling systems for Wireless LANs?

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 (IHSs¹) 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, followed by proposing the new ways to enhance their design, and then discussion of development of such a novel reference model for a scalable distributed IHS architecture.