Information sharing among vehicles is an essential component of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), but must take into consideration the security and privacy requirements of the network participants. Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a pervasive network, where vehicles communicate wirelessly with nearby vehicles, infrastructure nodes, and other connected devices to improve road safety and provide other useful services. Security of VANET can be improved by ensuring that only authorized vehicles can participate in the network. This research proposes a new approach that uses roadside units (RSUs) to authenticate safety messages and notify vehicles about any unauthorized messages/senders. We present a three‐tier architecture with a distributed blockchain to securely maintain the identity of all vehicles in the network. The use of this RSU‐based approach helps to reduce the computational overhead on the On‐board unit (OBU) of individual vehicles and does not require the transmission of lengthy certificates and certificate revocation lists with each message. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach achieves improved performance compared to existing techniques in terms of both authentication delay and channel load.