A Secure and Light Weight Authentication and Key Establishment Framework for Wireless Mesh Network

The advancements in networking technology resulted in emergence of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) on top of IEEE 802.11 standard to provide flexible and adaptive network architecture to next-generation wireless networks. Research proved that IEEE 802.11 is vulnerable to DoS and Man in the Middle attacks. Hence, WMN is also vulnerable to similar attacks. In this context, recently Somanath et al has provided an authentication framework for WMN and claimed that their framework is attack resistant. In this manuscript, after thorough evaluation of somanath et al authentication scheme, we have originated few inconsistencies and we will demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to replay and user impersonation attacks etc. As part of our contribution, we have developed a light weight authentication framework for WMN which is robust and attack resistant by preserving the merits of somanath et al framework.