Secure Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper describes a Security Enhanced AODV routing protocol for wireless mesh networks (SEAODV). SEAODV employs Blom’s key pre-distribution scheme to compute the pairwise transient key (PTK) through the flooding of enhanced HELLO message and subsequently uses the established PTK to distribute the group transient key (GTK). PTK and GTK are used for authenticating unicast and broadcast routing messages respectively. In wireless mesh networks, a unique PTK is shared by each pair of nodes, while GTK is shared secretly between the node and all its one-hop neighbors. A message authentication code (MAC) is attached as the extension to the original AODV routing message to guarantee the message’s authenticity and integrity in a hop-by-hop fashion. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that SEAODV is more effective in preventing identified routing attacks and outperforms ARAN and SAODV in terms of computation cost and route acquisition latency.