CAKA: a novel certificateless-based cross-domain authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless mesh networks

Abstract Due to the flexibility of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to form the backhaul subnetworks, future generation networks may have to integrate various kinds of WMNs under possibly various administrative domains. Aiming at establishing secure access and communications among the communication entities in a multi-domain WMN environment, in this paper, we intend to address the cross-domain authentication and key agreement problem. We present a light-weight cross-domain authentication and key agreement protocol, namely CAKA, under certificateless-based public key cryptosystem. CAKA has a few attractive features. First, mutual authentication and key agreement between any pair of users from different WMN domains can be easily achieved with two-round interactions. Second, no central domain authentication server is required and fast authentication for various roaming scenarios is supported by using a repeated cross-domain algorithm. Third, no revocation and renewal of certificates and key escrow are needed. Finally, it provides relatively more security features without increasing too much overhead of computation and storage. Our analysis shows that the proposed CAKA protocol is highly efficient in terms of communication overhead and resilient to various kinds of attacks.