Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews security threats, attacks, and defense mechanisms in wireless mesh networks, highlighting vulnerabilities across protocol layers and discussing trust management and open challenges.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of security issues, attack types, defense strategies, and trust management approaches specific to wireless mesh networks, filling gaps in current literature.

Findings

Identifies vulnerabilities across all communication protocol layers.

Analyzes various cryptographic and key management schemes.

Discusses open problems and future research directions.

Abstract

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.