Abstract: In order to resolve the safety problem in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), an efficient privacy-preserving scheme was proposed for VANET message authentication, which is based on the bilinear pairing technique for large-scale group communication and synthetically considers the actual situation of the VANET according to digital signature principles. In the scheme, vehicles are classified into private ones and public ones. The messages from private vehicles are verified by group signature, and those from public vehicles and roadside units (RSU) by identity-based signature. Furthermore, batch technique is introduced to accelerate the verification of accumulated messages, and quantitative comparison and determination is employed to handle the conflicting information. As a result, the information authentication efficiency is improved by about 33%, in comparison to that of the conventional schemes. Finally, an experimental simulation was conducted to confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme in various application scenarios. The results show that the scheme is robust and scalable, and meets the requests of VANET.