Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the
challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible,
adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective
solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular
replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking,
community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and
secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several
vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security
loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The
absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more
challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the
intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security
vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in
nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users
of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and
replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network
resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes
that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node
dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a
comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection
schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node
authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for
privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's
previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v
