Secure Anonymous Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Providing security and privacy to users are critical in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In this paper, a distributed security architecture is introduced to manage the mesh clients and a secure routing scheme that preserves the privacy of the end-users is proposed. In order to maximize routing efficiency, key indexing is used and symmetric cipher is employed in most part of the proposed scheme to reduce computational complexity. Both single-hop mesh client to mesh router and multi-hop mesh client to mesh client secure anonymous routing are proposed and discussed. Security and anonymity analysis are conducted followed by a complete performance analysis of the proposed protocol focusing on the route establish time and the routing overhead. The results show a reasonable overhead that linearly increases with the number of intermediate nodes. It is also demonstrated that the proposed schemes perform well against a broad range of attacks.