Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) broadcast messages regarding road and environmental conditions. Due to its design, VANET inadvertently introduced security and privacy issues. Many researchers have suggested various approaches to address these shortcomings as the deployment of VANET becomes more widespread. Nevertheless, these solutions could not address all the security and privacy shortcomings in VANET. Furthermore, the proposed approaches incur high costs in terms of computation due to the complexity involved in doing so sequentially. One of the significant approaches used in VANET security and privacy mitigation is identity-based schemes. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on VANETs and the entities involved, attack models, and an analysis of the security and privacy requirements for identity-based security and privacy schemes for VANETs.INDEX TERMS VANET, cyber-attack, bilinear pair, elliptic curve cryptography, identity-based cryptography.