With the increased number of vehicles, the traditional VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks) experiencing new face transitions. One such concept is Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC), where the data exchanges between vehicles or any entities, in traffic condition or in an emergency situation can be easily done. Establishing authentication and secure communication in VCC is a major problem because of the highly dynamic nature of vehicles. False messages may mislead the drivers which may cause serious issues. In this paper, we propose a lightweight protocol for authentication and secure communication in the VCC. More specifically, we design a lightweight protocol with hash operations, XORs, concatenations, etc., to ensure security. In-depth security analysis is done to check various attacks in the VCC system. In addition to that, we have done hardware implementation on a desktop computer, on a small single board computer-Raspberry Pi and verified the execution time needed. The performance analysis reveals that our protocol outperforms well in different scenarios like communication cost, storage overhead, computation time, and energy consumption. © 2019 IEEE.