An identity-based authentication and key establishment scheme for multi-operator maintained Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) offer broadband wireless Internet access with flexible and cost-effective deployment. Security is one of the key issues should be considered before WMNs get widespread use. Authentication and key establishment (AKE) schemes enable two entities to share common communication keys in an authentic way. In a WMN, a Mesh Client (MC) and the accessing Mesh Router (MR) need to need to authenticate each other before the secure connection could be set up between them. Due to mobility of MCs, a WMN needs to have efficient authentication and key establishment scheme to provide adequate security while meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, especially during clients handoff. Mesh routers (MRs) also need to authenticate each other before set up the wireless connection. In this paper, we propose a authentication and key establishment scheme for WMN based on the identity-based cryptography (IBC), which enables efficient key agreement and mutual authentication between network entities in a WMN. Through this distributed authentication key establishment scheme, network entities can authenticate each other and establish pairwise communication keys with substantially reduced communication overhead and authentication delay.