ARSA: An attack-resilient security architecture for multihop wireless mesh networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are finding ever-growing acceptance as a viable and effective solution to ubiquitous broadband Internet access. This paper addresses the security of WMNs, which is a key impediment to wide-scale deployment of WMNs, but thus far receives little attention. We first thoroughly identify the unique security requirements of WMNs for the first time in the literature. We then propose ARSA, an attack-resilient security architecture for WMNs. In contrast to a conventional cellular-like solution, ARSA eliminates the need for establishing bilateral roaming agreements and having real-time interactions between potentially numerous WMN operators. With ARSA in place, each user is no longer bound to any specific network operator, as he or she ought to do in current cellular networks. Instead, he or she acquires a universal pass from a third-party broker whereby to realize seamless roaming across WMN domains administrated by different operators. ARSA supports efficient mutual authentication and key agreement both between a user and a serving WMN domain and between users served by the same WMN domain. In addition, ARSA is designed to be resilient to a wide range of attacks. We also discuss other important issues such as incontestable billing.