Privacy Preserving Multi-Party Key Exchange Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks.

Abstract

Presently, lightweight devices such as mobile phones, notepads, and laptops are widely used to access the Internet throughout the world; however, a problem of privacy preservation and authentication delay occurs during handover operation when these devices change their position from a home mesh access point (HMAP) to a foreign mesh access point (FMAP). Authentication during handover is mostly performed through ticket-based techniques, which permit the user to authenticate itself to the foreign mesh access point; therefore, a secure communication method should be formed between the mesh entities to exchange the tickets. In two existing protocols, this ticket was not secured at all and exchanged in a plaintext format. We propose a protocol for handover authentication with privacy preservation of the transfer ticket via the Diffie-Hellman method. Through experimental results, our proposed protocol achieves privacy preservation with minimum authentication delay during handover operation.