With the rapid advancement of different types of wireless technologies the problem arose of combining them together to provide improved bandwidth and enhanced throughput. The answer came out in the form of a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). A typical WMN is made up of mesh routers and mesh clients where mesh routers have somewhat limited mobility and they form the backbone of the network whereas mesh clients are allowed to be highly mobile or completely stationary or somewhere in between. This forms a very versatile network which allows clients with different levels of mobility, interface and bandwidth requirements to be a part of the same network. The communication can be achieved by directly communicating with the router by being in its range or in an ad hoc fashion through several hops. A WMN is mainly designed to be self-configured and self-adjusting dynamically. This ensures large network coverage with minimum infrastructure requirements, hence low cost. Although a WMN gives multifold advantages it is also vulnerable to several security and privacy threats being a dynamic open medium. Different types of clients such as laptops, cell phones, smart devices can join or leave the network anytime they wish. This opens up issues like fake registrations and packet sniffing.
This work deals with the issues of security and privacy separately in two parts in great detail by simulating
countermeasures for different kinds of attacks in a WMN. The first part mainly deals with creating a perfectly
secure network for safe communication by using a bi-variate polynomial scheme for low overheads instead
of a public-private key mechanism. The second part deals with making any communication in the network
anonymous by hiding the node initiating the session by using redundancy at the cost of some associated
overheads.