In the present world, we are enabled with distinct technology devices and/or systems mostly to reduce human effort in completing various tasks. To fulfill our activities within a reasonable period, we expect reliable communication system(s) to exchange significant data securely. The vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is a system to control vehicle-related data for various computations and this data helps to different vehicle operators straightaway or indirectly. However, a receiver should confirm the correctness of obtained information else it influences in erroneous ways. Recently, Zhong et al. suggested a privacy-preserving authentication model but in this paper, we identify that this scheme cannot withstand against some attacks, i.e., impersonation, modification, plain-text, and man-in-the-middle. Thus, we propose an improved message confirmation system for the VCC to protect various security attacks, e.g., replay, plain-text, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and modification. Further, we do performance and security analysis of the suggested method. Next, we compare the proposed system with different message verification protocols and the results show that the suggested method is more secure and effective compared to other related communication protocols. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.