Automatic management of firewall rules and policies in accordance with relevancy to network traffic of a wireless network

1. A computer-implemented method, in a firewall device having a processor and a network communication interface, the firewall device implemented at least partially in hardware and on a data communication network, for automatically managing firewall rules and policies in accordance with application changes of a wireless network, the method comprising the steps of:

storing firewall rules in a repository of the firewall device;

detecting at a station that an application has been added, and enabling related firewall rules at the firewall device;

assigning default values to relevancy scores for firewall rules when initially stored;

identifying the application from a network packet associated with a wireless network;

applying a specific firewall rule to the network packet being examined based on the identified application and based on a ranking of a relevancy score, wherein the specific firewall rule belongs to a predetermined rule category, and the relevancy score is above a specific relevancy threshold;

responsive to the specific firewall rule application, increasing the relevancy score associated with the specific firewall rule and decreasing relevancy scores for other firewall rules of the predetermined firewall rule category that are not applied to the network packet;

ranking firewall rules of the category, for order of application, based on the relevancy scores;

disabling firewall rules having relevancy scores below a predetermined relevancy threshold;

and detecting at the station that the application has been removed, and disabling related firewall rules at the firewall device.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

detecting a relatively heavy traffic load for the firewall device,

wherein applying the specific rule comprises applying the specific firewall rule according to probabilities assigned to the relevancy score of the specific rule.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the predetermined rule category is selected from: a source entity, a destination entity, a protocol, and a time.

4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

notifying a network administrator of the disabled firewall rules.

5. A non-transitory computer-readable media storing source code that, when executed by a processor, performs a computer-implemented method, in a firewall device having a processor and a network communication interface, the firewall device implemented at least partially in hardware and on a data communication network, for automatically managing firewall rules and policies in accordance with application changes of a wireless network, the method comprising the steps of:

storing firewall rules in a repository of the firewall device;

detecting at a station that an application has been added, and enabling related firewall rules at the firewall device;

assigning default values to relevancy scores for firewall rules when initially stored;

identifying the application from a network packet associated with a wireless network;

applying a specific firewall rule to the network packet being examined based on the identified application and based on a ranking of a relevancy score, wherein the specific firewall rule belongs to a predetermined rule category, and the relevancy score is above a specific relevancy threshold;

responsive to the specific firewall rule application, increasing the relevancy score associated with the specific firewall rule and decreasing relevancy scores for other firewall rules of the predetermined firewall rule category that are not applied to the network packet;

ranking firewall rules of the category, for order of application, based on the relevancy scores;

and disabling firewall rules having relevancy scores below a predetermined relevancy threshold;

and detecting at the station that the application has been removed, and disabling related firewall rules at the firewall device.