To protect and secure critical wireless network communications, high-end security services are used to encrypt, authenticate and validate packets. This approach opens up a new area of system attacks. Since the security services are time and resource demanding, a service may be easily overworked. Using Adaptive Packet Discard Mechanisms in conjunction with a lightweight packet classifying mechanism, it is possible to reduce, if not remove, the effects of a Denial-of-Service attack on complex security services, and thus creating a hier-archical approach to security.