Title: OAP-WMN: optimised and secure authentication protocol for wireless mesh networks

Authors: Malek Rekik; Amel Meddeb-Makhlouf; Faouzi Zarai; Petros Nicopolitidis

Addresses: NTS'COM Research Unit, ENET'COM, University of Sfax, Tunisia ' NTS'COM Research Unit, ENET'COM, University of Sfax, Tunisia ' NTS'COM Research Unit, ENET'COM, University of Sfax, Tunisia ' Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract: Wireless mesh networks (WMN) proposes many attractive features to mobile networking area such as: self-reconfiguration and self-organisation which make it more flexible, easy deployed and not expensive. But, these features make it constantly overwhelmed with different types of security threats. In this article, we propose an optimised and secure authentication and re-authentication schemes based on the extensible authentication protocol (EAP) mechanism. The proposed solution ensures security of WMN handoff and with a better QoS. It achieves this by reducing the number of exchanging messages and computations in the proposed authentication and re-authentication processes. Besides, we choose to secure the link layer that makes the authentication process more efficient and optimised. For performance evaluation, we use the OPENSSL tool to compare our work with some related work and the result is good. Moreover, the security of our authentication scheme has been affirmed with the AVISPA tool.

Keywords: wireless mesh network; WMN; IEEE 802.11s; extensible authentication protocol; EAP; authentication; handoff; QoS; AVISPA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2019.103151

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2019 Vol.14 No.4, pp.205 - 220

Received: 15 Apr 2018
Accepted: 04 Feb 2019
Published online: 21 Oct 2019 *

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