Secure neighbour discovery in wireless mesh networks using connectivity information

Authenticated mesh peering exchange (AMPE) is one of the core functionalities of wireless mesh network(WMN) that facilitates mesh routers to discover their peers (neighbours), securely. Even though the AMPE protocol prevents unauthorized neighbours from becoming part of the network, it fails to prevent relay attacks, where an attacker can simply relay frames used to establish peer-links. The motivation of an attacker is to convince two far-away nodes as neighbours, and make them commit to a non-existent link that acts as a wormhole later. In this paper, we address this problem of relay attacks and propose a secure neighbour discovery mechanism that detects non-existent network links. It relies on a ranking mechanism to compute relative distance between neighbours, and employs connectivity information to validate those links.