Secured and reliable routing is a crucial factor for improving the performance of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) since these networks are susceptible to many types of attacks. The existing assumption about the internal nodes in wireless mesh networks is that they cooperate well during the forwarding of packets all the time. However, it is not always true due to the presence of malicious and mistrustful nodes. Hence, it is essential to establish a secure, reliable and stable route between a source node and a destination node in WMN. In this paper, a trust based secure routing algorithm is proposed for enhancing security and reliability of WMN, which contains cross layer and subject logic based reliable reputation scheme with security tag model for providing effective secured routing. This model uses only the trusted nodes with the forwarding reliability of data transmission and it isolates the malicious nodes from the providing path. Moreover, every node in this model is assigned with a security tag that is used for efficient authentication. Thus, by combining authentication, trust and subject logic, the proposed approach is capable of choosing the trusted nodes effectively to participate in forwarding the packets of trustful peer nodes successfully. The simulation results obtained from this work show that the proposed routing protocol provides optimal network performance in terms of security and packet delivery ratio. © 2019 KSII.