Security in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have recently captured the interest of academic and industrial researcher communities; because they represent a good solution to providing wireless Internet connectivity in a sizable geographic area. However, the architecture and configuration of this type of network do not ensure protection against unauthorized use of the network. This is because the basic used security measures do not include the notion of mobility, which characterizes these networks. In this article, we first propose a secure re-authentication mechanism named Secure Wireless Mobility Management (SWMM). This mechanism is carried out while the mobile station (MS) crosses different nodes, to allow users fulfilling an effective and reliable handoff as well as a secure access to services offered by the WMN. Second, we propose a new scheme, called Selective and Deterministic Pipelined packet Marking for Mesh Networks (SDPMM). This scheme is used for IP traffic source identification for tracing denial of service (DoS) attacks. The approach follows the IP traceback approach proposed in wired networks. Our study shows that SWMM outperforms other existing methods in terms of handoff latency, loss and blocking rate. It also shows that the traffic overhead introduced by the traceback scheme does not affect the network performance.