Stateful Firewalling for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Firewalls have been traditionally used to apply filtering policies in wired networks, to divide zones with different level of trust. In wireless distributed networks, such as mesh networks for service delivery, firewalling is a valuable instrument to control the behavior of the clients and avoid certain attacks, such as DoS attacks coming from the inside of the network. In previous works we have outlined the possibility of applying stateless firewalling to distributed mesh networks using Bloom filters. In this paper we will expand this model to perform stateful firewalling in mesh networks, that will allow a more fine-grained control over the traffic passing over the network. Preliminary experimental results are also provided.