Securing Wireless Mesh Network from Wormhole Attacks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become a popular technology to provide broadband Internet access, as it allows fast, easy and inexpensive network deployment. On the other hand, the commercial success of a WMN depends on the ability to provide secure and reliable communication. Unfortunately, the current peer link establishment mechanism presented in IEEE 802.11s draft standard for WMN, is vulnerable to various kinds of relay and wormhole attacks, which targets to degrade the network reliability by influencing path-selection decisions and then launching packet dropping attacks. Therefore, there is a need to ensure the security of the current peer-link establishment protocol and thereby ensuring the reliability of the path-selection protocol. To achieve security in the current peer link establishment, a certificate-based peer link establishment protocol that employs location information to prevent relay attacks and a two-hop reporting mechanism to ensure the reliability of the current path-selection protocol HWMP (Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol) have been proposed. These results are published in the Proc. of Springer LNCS, 4¬th International Conference on wireless and mobile networks, (WiMoN), Chennai 2012.