SUMMARYThe IEEE P802.11s/D4.0 standard is not considered secure for the routing protocol. In this paper, we propose IBC‐HWMP, a secure Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) using identity‐based cryptography (IBC). The reason we use IBC is that it does not need to verify the authenticity of public keys. We have implemented the IBC mechanism to secure control messages in HWMP, namely path request and path reply. Our aim is to focus on secure data exchange in mutable fields. Through extensive ns‐3 simulations, results show that the overhead introduced by IBC‐HWMP is not significant compared with the classical HWMP and that, at the same time, we improve the security. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.