## 1 Introduction
Some prior research exists on securing the layer-3 routing protocols for a WMN [10]. Secure ad hoc on-demand distance vector (SAODV) routing [9] is a secure variant of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing. Authenticated routing for _ad hoc_ networks (ARAN) [11] uses public key cryptography to ensure the integrity of the routing messages. For example, Ariadne [12] ensures a secure on-demand source routing. The Secure Route Discovery Protocol (SRDP) [13] uses a one-way hash function for route requests and public key signatures for route reply messages. All of these protocols provide end-to-end security between the source and destination nodes, and each has it own pros and cons [10, 14]. Ning _et al._[15] studied some insider attacks against the AODV routing protocol, which is very similar to the reactive mode of HWMP. The authors successfully achieved the attacking goals for routing protocol, including route disruption, route invasion, node isolation, and resource consumption, by misusing the protocol messages, route request (RREQ), route reply (RREP), and route error (RERR) messages. Their misuse actions are message drop, modifying and forwarding, forge replying, and active forging. Both the MFs and NMFs are possible message modification targets. Their attacks are effective to the reactive mode of the HWMP. Prior research also exists on securing the layer-2 routing protocol HWMP. The secure HWMP (SHWMP) [10] secures HWMP frames from external attacks. However, SHWMP does not address internal attacks. SHWMP provides integrity service for the MFs and confidentiality service for the NMFs in a point-to-point link. This protocol does not provide integrity assurance from the source node to protect against non-mutable field modification attacks. This protocol also does not have any security schemes for the path error (PERR) HWMP routing protocol frames. Ben-Othman _et al._[16] proposed a security mechanism based on the identity-based cryptography (IBC) to secure HWMP. Hereafter, we denote this security mechanism as IBC-HWMP. A media access control (MAC) address is used as the identity for all mesh STAs. A private key is used to sign the MF such that the integrity of the MF is protected. Like SHWMP, the IBC-HWMP protocol also does not provide integrity assurance from the source node to protect against non-mutable field modification attacks. This protocol does not have any security schemes for PERR or root announcement (RANN) HWMP routing protocol frames. In terms of the design process of a secure scheme for a routing protocol, the vulnerabilities analysis of the protocol is the first step. The second step is setting up suitable security requirements to protect against the identified vulnerabilities. The last step is designing a secure scheme that satisfies the requirements. The existing secure schemes have not been designed using this process, and as a result, they are at risk of having security defects. In this paper, the vulnerabilities of HWMP frames are examined [15, 17, 18] and security requirements for HWMP are developed based on these vulnerabilities. Next, the security requirements are used to analyze the effectiveness of existing security protocols, including the BIP [8], CCMP [19], SHWMP, IBC-HWMP, ECDSA-HWMP [20], and Watchdog-HWMP [21]. It is useful to analyze these security protocols because CCMP and BIP are the default security protocols used to protect Wi-Fi management frames. SHWMP, IBC-HWMP, ECDSA-HWMP, and Watchdog-HWMP, in contrast, have been developed in recent years to protect the HWMP frames. We present a quantitative complexity comparison among the protocols and an example of security scheme for HWMP to demonstrate how the results of our research can be utilized. We hope that the application of our proposed security requirements and analyses assists future research on HWMP security.