Wireless Mesh Network Access Control And Its Applications

Along with the continuous development of communication technology and the increasingly rising communication requirement of people, Wireless Mesh Networks, a new type high capability and high speed networks, has gained more and more attention. However, because of its different characteristics of the structure, there is no protocol suitable enough to provide access authentication services and security protection for it. A detailed analysis of the security performances of three dominating safety standards, Wired Equivalent Privacy, Wi-Fi Protected Access, and WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure leads to the conclusion that the current popular wireless security protocols exist their weaknesses and can not provide sufficient protection for WMN.In order to address this problem and give consideration to the new security requirement of WMN, the author has designed a new access authentication protocol, Wireless Mesh Networks Protected Access, detailed the objectives of WMNPA, and designed an access authentication mechanism, a key negotiation mechanism, a node exit mechanism and a protocol state machine. The major innovation of WMNPA is that the design takes full account of the insecurity of wireless channel, not only the applicant but also the access point need be verified, the applicant's identity is secret, and the management frames are protected by temporary keys. By using a formal analysis method, AUTOLOG logical, analysing the authentication mechanism, the author has proved that WMNPA achieves the mutual and anonymous authentication, and is reliable in logic. In order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of communication for the legal users, the author has also designed the WMNPA data encapsulation transmission mechanism, and the encryption and decryption algorithm.The author has implemented and tested WMNPA in HostAP platform. Through the comparison tests with WEP, WPA and WPA2, the author gets the conclusion: in HostAP platform, the WMNPA access authentication latency is slightly more than WPA, its data throughput is slightly higher than WPA2, and its performance has further room for improvement.