Research On Pairwise Key Establishment In Wireless Mesh Networks

With the advancements of modern technologies, various type of wireless net-works have been proposed and applied to meet the demands of the public. As a promising wireless network technology, wireless Mesh networks (hereinafter, WMNs) have emerged and attracted much attention from academia and industry.It is generally considered that in WMNs, communications are vulnerable to many malicious cyber attacks due to the nature of wireless transmission. Kinds of security protocols have been proposed to countermeasure potential attacks in WMNs. As a fundamental security technology, pairwise key establishment has been both extensively and intensively studied in WMNs and other similar situations. However, it is still a non-trivial task to establish pairwise keys efficiently for power-constrained nodes. Our main contributions are summarized as follows:1. We present a new matrix-based pairwise key establishment scheme for Mesh clients. Our design is motivated by the fact that in WMNs, Mesh routers are more powerful than Mesh clients, both in computation and communication. By exploiting this heterogeneity, expensive operations can be delegated to Mesh routers, which help alleviate the overhead of Mesh clients during key establish-ment, we also propose another matrix-based pairwise key establishment scheme for Mesh clients using deployment knowledge.2. We propose a pairwise key establishment scheme based on two polynomials in wireless Mesh networks by employing the nature of heterogeneity. Our scheme realizes the property of bloom filter’s, i.e., neighbor nodes can discover their shared keys but have no knowledge on the different keys possessed by the other node, without the probability of false positive.