ABSTRACT

As various wireless networks evolve into the next generation to provide better services, a key technology, wireless mesh networks (WMNs), has emerged recently. There are number of issues in the deployment of WMNs. Amongst others security is quite a serious issue. Authenticating the users and devices in the network is a key point of network security. IEEE 802.11s mesh networks do not have any well defined or specified security architecture which can cater to large number of diversified applications. As the major characteristic of WMNs is multihop therefore using the 802.11i as the security standard is inadequate to provide security in Wireless Mesh Networks primarily because 802.11i was designed with the central security mechanism. In this paper a new approach using threshold authorization model with Clustered Certificate Authority is proposed which caters to the best of both the centralized and distributed architecture.

Keywords: Wireless Mesh networks, threshold authorization, secret key sharing.