- Does BATMAN provide any method of *authenticating* nodes?
As I've said earlier, sometimes transferred data will be highly sensitive (for example: information of patients health in hospital), so it's absolutely critical to not allow leaking this information.
For this sort of application you need end-to-end security. That is, your end devices authenticate each other, probably using certificates. They then negotiate a key and then encrypt all the traffic end-to-end. It does not matter if the data leaks, since its not practical for anybody to decode it. You then don't care about you mesh, its just an untrusted data pipe from A to B.
You should probably get a good book on security and learn all about what Alice and Bob need to do.
The mesh itself is not important. You cannot trust it, hence its not important.
Andrew