Secure routing protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Network (HWMN)

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 and deployment. 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. As a consequence, HWMP in its current from is vulnerable to various types of routing attacks such as flooding, route disruption and diversion, spoofing etc. In this paper, we propose a secure HWMP routing protocol for WMN. The proposed protocol uses cryptographic extensions to provide authenticity and integrity of HWMP routing messages and prevents unauthorized manipulation of mutable fields in the routing information elements. We will show that the proposed protocol successfully thwarts all the identified attacks.