In this digital era, it is very difficult to think of any situation in our daily life that is not using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It is the main component and infrastructure that empower modern computing. These improvements offer many useful features in automobiles industry as well. It emphasis on the green environment, engines with high performance, secure design, etc. The concept of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) or smart transport includes a large range of methods and applications. The use of embedded intelligence to connect the vehicles, to the infrastructure and central sites make them smart. The smart transportation achieves smart policy goals in the urban environment such as increased mobility, better safety, reduced emissions, minimum fuel usage, and economic competitiveness. The VANET (vehicular ad-hoc network) has the ability to build better solutions for poor road conditions, traffic congestion, weather predictions, driving safety, passenger comfort, and other related applications by exchanging data on the road. However, it is not an easy task to ensure secure data transmission in VANETs due to different challenges such as dynamic topology, different direction, high mobility, etc. In our scheme, we propose a lightweight secure authentication and communication system for VANETs. Our protocol mainly focuses on one of the main application of VANETs, that is warning messages. Analysis and results demonstrate that our protocol outperforms well in different perspectives such as communication cost, storage overhead, and computation time. © 2018 IEEE.