To defend intelligent transportation networks’ security and privacy, existing standards employ the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) authentication framework. However, the high associated PKI computation and communication overheads break ground for utilizing an alternative candidate, the Identity-based Cryptographic (IBC) authentication. Most of the underlined calculations of the IBC approaches rely on the elliptic curves’ pairing operation. Since the pairing function is a complex and computation intensive operation, several studies have developed pairingless IBC authentications and applied the hardware security of tamper-proof devices to secure the cryptographic parameters at user-end. Motivated by this trend, we compose a Pairingless Modified Efficient Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme (PME-CPPAS). Our scheme omits the utilization of the complex pairing operation as well as the demand for expensive tamper-proof devices. When analyzing the performance of the presented design, its effectiveness, in comparison to the available pairing-based and pairingless approaches, is proved in terms of computation complexity, communication overhead, and storage overhead. PME-CPPAS achieves less signing computational cost and comparable verification computational performance. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.