Secure and efficient authentication in Wireless Mesh Networks using merkle trees

Abstract

In the recent years, wireless mesh network (WMN) has evolved as a new paradigm for broadband wireless Internet access. The self-configurability, open wireless infrastructure, and different management styles of WMN make them vulnerable to malicious attackers. As a first step to secure WMNs, it is critical to incorporate an authentication mechanism for mesh clients. The existing proposals are primarily based on public key certificates, which incur considerable overhead in signature verification. We propose a network layer authentication mechanism called Merkle Tree based Mesh Authentication Protocol (MT-MAP) for WMNs. It incorporates inexpensive hash operations using Merkle tree to authenticate single/multihop mesh clients. We also show how the use of hash tree facilitates fast and periodic refresh of authentication certificates. Finally, we present a security analysis of MT-MAP against impersonation and replay attacks.