Privacy Preserving Multi-Party Key Exchange Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks.

Amit Kumar Roy,Keshab Nath,Gautam Srivastava,Thippa Reddy Gadekallu,Jerry Chun-Wei Lin

doi:10.3390/s22051958

Abstract

Presently, lightweight devices such as mobile phones, notepads, and laptops are widely used to access the Internet throughout the world; however, a problem of privacy preservation and authentication delay occurs during handover operation when these devices change their position from a home mesh access point (HMAP) to a foreign mesh access point (FMAP). Authentication during handover is mostly performed through ticket-based techniques, which permit the user to authenticate itself to the foreign mesh access point; therefore, a secure communication method should be formed between the mesh entities to exchange the tickets. In two existing protocols, this ticket was not secured at all and exchanged in a plaintext format. We propose a protocol for handover authentication with privacy preservation of the transfer ticket via the Diffie–Hellman method. Through experimental results, our proposed protocol achieves privacy preservation with minimum authentication delay during handover operation.

Highlights

As compared to conventional networks such as LAN and MANET, wireless mesh networks (WMN) have become the most promising network presently due to their advanced features
We present an efficient authentication protocol during handover operation along with privacy preservation of tickets shared over the insecure channel
Throughout login authentication process (LAP) the information TM1, NM2, NC2 and ΘC are shared in a plaintext format as MAP1 → C: TM1 shown in Equation (5), C → MAP1 : NM2 as shown in Equation (8) and MAP1 → C: NC2, ΘC as shown in Equation (9)

Summary

Introduction

As compared to conventional networks such as LAN and MANET, wireless mesh networks (WMN) have become the most promising network presently due to their advanced features. Due to their capacity to be self-organized and self-healing, WMN are the most favorable network [1]. Mesh routers are called mesh access points (MAP), which forward the mesh client’s request to the gateway router (GW) for Internet access [2–5]. Due to the non-static nature, mesh clients can change their position from a home mesh access point to a foreign mesh access point. A secure handover authentication process should be carried out among mesh entities

Results

Discussion

Conclusion