Image authentication using distributed arithmetic coding (DAC) is studied in this paper. The quantized random projections of the original image are compressed by a DAC encoder and the codeword is taken as the authentication data. With the help of a target image as side information, the DAC decoder could recover the projections. The authentication process is achieved by examining the Euclidean distance between the reconstructed projections and the side information. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed approach has a simpler structure without the help of an additional cryptographic hash function to verify the decoding result. Moreover, the authentication data is more compact with fewer size. Simulation results justify that the proposed approach achieves a comparable performance as existing schemes.