PEACE: A Novel Privacy-Enhanced Yet Accountable Security Framework for Metropolitan Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract—Recently, multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted increasing attention and deployment as a low-cost approach to provide broadband Internet access at metropolitan scale. Security and privacy issues are of most concern in pushing the success of WMNs for their wide deployment and for supporting service-oriented applications. Despite the necessity, limited security research has been conducted toward privacy preservation in WMNs. This motivates us to develop PEACE, a novel Privacy-Enhanced yet Accountable seCurity framEwork, tailored for WMNs. On one hand, PEACE enforces strict user access control to cope with both free riders and malicious users. On the other hand, PEACE offers sophisticated user privacy protection against both adversaries and various other network entities. PEACE is presented as a suite of authentication and key agreement protocols built upon our proposed short group signature variation. Our analysis shows that PEACE is resilient to a number of security and privacy related attacks. Additional techniques were also discussed to further enhance scheme efficiency. Index Terms—Wireless mesh networks, privacy, authentication, security, anonymous communication. Ç