Focusing on the problem that the privacy-preserving of identity authentication in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANET), a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme was proposed. Firstly, this paper introduced the short signature technology, and then constructed a new identity-based short signature scheme. Compared with the well-known Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme (CPAS), the proposed scheme could reduce the computation costs required for both signature and verification processes and improve the communication efficiency. Secondly, the scheme divided the private signature key into two correlative sub-segments, so that it could effectively solve the issue of key escrow. Therefore, the scheme was especially suitable for the environment of VANET. Based on the proposed signature scheme, a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme was presented, which can achieve identity authentication with conditional privacy preservation. The theoretical and efficiency analysis shows that the scheme needs only three dot multiplication in the signature process and takes one dot multiplication, two pairing operation in the verification process. Especially, the proposed scheme use batch verification by adding the small coefficient test to accelerate the authentication speed and reduce the error rate.