With the rapid advancement in wireless communications and network technology, the vehicular ad-hoc network has become an interesting topic for researchers due to intelligent transportation systems on the road. However, the communications are performed through wireless mediums and involve vehicles, which have limited storage space and computation capability. Therefore, secure and lightweight schemes are required for authentication and communication purposes. In this paper, we propose an identity-based communication method using bilinear pairings to provide computationally better and secure communication between vehicles and infrastructure (V2V and V2I) in VANETs. This scheme is secure against various security attacks, namely, man-in-the-middle, forgery, impersonation, replay, etc. The computation and communication costs also have been improved considerably compared to other related schemes. © 2019 IEEE.