Securing wireless mesh networks in a unified security framework with corruption-resilience

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are expected to be widespread due to their excellent properties like low-cost deployment, easy arrangement and self-organization. Although some proposed security schemes for WMNs with various security objectives have been put forward recently, it is a challenge to employ a uniform cryptography context to achieve resilience to trust authority corruption and maintain trust relationships flexibly among different domains. In this paper, a unified security framework (USF) for multi-domain wireless mesh networks is proposed. The identity-based encryption and the certificateless signature are unified in the proposed cryptography operations utilizing bilinear groups to solve key escrow problem. To ensure secure muliti-hop communication in WMN, the intra and inter domain authentication and key agreement protocols are devised sophisticatedly to achieve perfect forward secrecy and attack-resilience. With the enhanced security properties in the USF scheme, when a trust authority is corrupted, parts of the WMN could be survivable in the local area if proper measures are taken. A formal security proof of the proposed authentication protocols is presented based on Universal Composable security theory. The detailed performance analysis shows that the enhanced security attributes are achieved with reasonable overhead.