An Efficient Authenticated Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a promising technology in providing high-bandwidth Internet access over a specific coverage area, with relative lower investment cost as compared with traditional wireless access networks. Authenticated key establishment (AKE) schemes enable two entities (e.g., a client and a server) to share common communication keys in an authentic way. Due to mobility of Mesh Clients (MCs), a WMN needs to have fast and efficient AKE scheme to provide adequate security during clients handoff while meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose a lightweight distributed AKE scheme based on hierarchical multi-variable symmetric functions (HMSF). In this AKE scheme, network entities in a WMN such as MCs and mesh routers can authenticate each other and establish pairwise communication keys without any interaction from the centralized authentication center, which substantially reduces the communication overhead and authentication delay.