Vol.:(0123456789) The Journal of Supercomputing https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03302-1 1 3 MDSbSP: a search protocol based on MDS codes for RFID‑based Internet of vehicle Morteza Adeli 1  · Nasour Bagheri 2,3 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The new era of the Internet of Things is driving the evolution of conventional vehi- cle ad hoc networks into the Internet of vehicles (IoV). Radio frequency identifca- tion (RFID) is a reliable and advanced instrument used for automated data collec- tion, processing and tracking, which is widely used in IoV. One of the important features of an RFID system is its ability to search for a particular tag among a group of tags. Since the RFID tags used in vehicles are commonly resource-constrained, the purpose is to propose a lightweight tag searching protocol that meets the security requirements while at the same time it is respecting the requirements for efcient implementation. In this regard, a lightweight tag search protocol, which is based on permutation matrices, has recently been proposed by Fan et al. and claimed to be secure against various attacks. In this paper, we analyze the security of this proto- col and show that this scheme is vulnerable to de-synchronization and disclosure attacks. The latter attack can disclose all the secret information stored in a tag such as the identity, the shared secret key and the two secret permutation matrices that are used as encryption functions. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose an improved lightweight tag search protocol based on maximum distance separable matrices. As a result of security analysis, we can see that the improved scheme is secure against passive and active attacks, including disclosure and de-synchroniza- tion attack. Finally, we implement the improved protocol in ISE 14.6 environment for Virtex-7 FPGAs and compare the performance with some related protocols. The implementation results show that the improved scheme is particularly well suited for use in RFID systems. Keywords IoV · Search protocol · Security analysis · Matrix encryption · MDS matrix * Nasour Bagheri NBagheri@srttu.edu Extended author information available on the last page of the article