A Secure Mutual Authentication Protocol for Roaming in Wireless Mesh Networks

Roaming in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) requires that mobile nodes complete access authentication fast while protecting the identities of mobile nodes. In this paper, after analyzing some current authentication protocols for roaming in wireless mesh networks, we propose a new protocol based on multi-signature and three-party key agreement with a zone-based hierarchical network topology and prove the security properties of the protocol through formal analysis that is based on the strand space model. We also demonstrate the reliability and performance of the proposed protocol through network simulations.