An Identity-Based Security Architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology for last-mile broadband Internet access. This new and promising paradigm allows a fast, easy and inexpensive network deployment. While much effort has been made to address issues at physical, data link, and network layers, little attention has been paid to the security aspect central to the realistic deployment of WMNs. This paper addresses security of WMNs and proposes ISA (identity-based security architecture) for WMNs. ISA eliminates the need for certificate-based public-key distribution indispensable in conventional PKI schemes. It provides a light weight network access protocol based on pairing and hash function. As to key revocation, it introduces a neighbor detection mechanism. The public key of a node is revoked if a certain threshold number of nodes accused the node. ISA also enables efficient network-wide key update via a single broadcast message.