An ID-based authentication scheme for the IEEE 802.11s Mesh Network

Nowadays authentication in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) refers to the 802.1X authentication methods or a Preshared key authentication, and makes use of certificates or shared secrets. In wireless environments, management of certificates is disadvantageous. Certificates require deploying a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certification Authorities (CA) and they require defining a certificate management policy to control the generation, transmission and revocation of certificates. Management of certificates is a cumbersome task and does not match the limited (power and memory) resources available at wireless nodes. Moreover it does not match the non permanent connectivity to CA. In this paper, we propose an ID-based method, as an alternative to the PKI, to provide nodes with private and public keys, and we present an authentication scheme that uses the ID-based cryptographic concepts. As illustrated in the paper, the authentication scheme is shown as suitable to the WMN networks.