Wireless Mesh Networks, WMNs, are foreseen to be an alternative to LANs and last- mile access
infrastructures, and they have many unique characteristics, such as ease of deployment and installation,
and cost efficiency. Security is crucial for WMNs
to be widely accepted as internetworking and access
network technologies. Access control, as a security requirement, is one of the most important pillars that
lay down the foundation for such an acceptance. We identify in this paper the criteria that should be
fulfilled by a viable security solution to control access to WMNs, and specify DUA, a security scheme, that
allows for mutual authentication. DUA is based on the distribution of authentication key material over
many nodes in such a way that any coalition of a predetermined threshold of corrupted nodes or fewer
does not compromise the security of the system. Further, the key material is never handled by a single
node. In addition, DUA provides for efficiency through the use of lightweight cryptographic operations.
