Securing IEEE 802.11 based hybrid wireless mesh networks

In recent years, mesh networking has emerged as a key technology for the last mile Internet access and found to be an important area of research. The current draft standard of IEEE 802.11s has defined routing for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) in layer-2 and is termed as Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP). However, security in routing or forwarding functionality is not specified in the standard. The protocol does not provide authentication and integrity of routing messages which makes it vulnerable to many attacks. As a consequence, the routing protocol in its current form is vulnerable to various types of routing attacks. In this paper, we propose modified HWMP routing protocol for WMN which uses cryptographic extensions to protect unprotected routing information elements. We will show that the proposed protocol successfully prevents all the identified attacks.