ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the need of sufficient and efficient authentication and integrity checks at every hop by presenting several attack scenarios and explaining possible constraints on wireless mesh routers. It presents a novel protocol suite aimed to provide hop integrity for multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The chapter also presents the two versions of the integrity check protocol: weak version and strong version. Hop integrity is fundamental to several protocols in the hop integrity protocol suite that are aimed to counter the aforementioned attacks and strengthen the security of wireless mesh networks. The strong hop integrity protocol is presented in two steps: using “soft sequence numbers” to detect and discard replayed data messages, and integrating this soft sequence number protocol into the weak integrity check protocol to construct the strong integrity check protocol. Wireless mesh networks are vulnerable to security attacks at various layers.
