SUMMARYSelfish nodes are nodes that are reluctant to forward packets for others in wireless mesh networks. One of the effective techniques to remove them is to share the information of identified selfish nodes in the network. However, most selfish node detection schemes rarely address the trustworthiness of their shared information in the network. It turns devastating if smart selfish nodes are able to manipulate the shared information. We propose a detection framework named Separation of Detection Authority, which delegates the detection process to different entities. Particularly, its detection efficacy is modelled as the probability to have majority neighbours of nodes consist of well‐behaved node. Our analytic and simulation results show that the decentralised nature of Separation of Detection Authority is effective against these smart selfish nodes in static wireless mesh network. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.