To achieve security with efficiency in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is an important issue due to its distributed nature and absence of centralised authority. Due to the absence of central authority, the authentication becomes a challenging task in WMNs. Several attacks could be easily launched in WMNs such as replay attack and impersonation attack. These types of attacks could be launched by an intruders by injecting malicious packets throughout the network among mesh entities. Therefore to overcome from such attacks, we had proposed an efficient multi-hop packet authentication protocol known as 'efficient packet authentication through Diffie-Hellman approach (EPADH)'. Through experimental results, our proposed protocol ensures packet authentication which resists the mentioned attacks and offers efficiency in terms of latency, throughput, packet delivery ratio, and memory utilisation.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) upraised as superior technology offering all aspects of services as compared to conventional networks. Due to the absence of centralised authority, WMNs suffers from both external and internal attacks, which decrease the overall performance of WMNs. In this study, the authors proposed an efficient handoff authentication protocol with privacy preservation of nonce and transfer ticket against external attacks during handoff and proposed round trip time (RTT)‐based detection protocol to resist against internal attacks in WMNs. For privacy preservation of nonce and transfer ticket, encryption of the nonce and transfer ticket during handoff authentication process was considered. For detection, the calculation of RTT and processing time to identify the malicious nodes forming wormhole link were considered. The proposed work prevents the AODV routing protocol against the wormhole attack in WMNs. The simulation of the proposed work was done using NS‐3 simulator, and the experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method prevents WMNs from both external and internal attacks.