A Unified Security Framework for Multi-domain Wireless Mesh Networks

The research issues of large scale wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted increasing attention due to the excellent properties of WMNs. Although some proposals for WMN security framework with different security aspects have been put forward recently, it is a challenging issue of employing uniform public key cryptography to maintain trust relationships flexibly among domains and to achieve key-escrow-free anonymous access control. In this paper, a unified security framework (USF) for multi-domain wireless mesh networks is proposed, which unifies id-based encryption and certificateless signature in a single public key cryptography context. Trust relationship between different domains and anonymous access control of wireless clients can be realized by employing of cryptography operations on bilinear groups. To achieve perfect forward secrecy and attack-resilience, trust domain construction methods and authentication protocols are devised within the security framework without key escrow.