How to secure ITS applications?

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) based on vehicular communication enable cooperative applications to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. Security remains a major challenge because it has a great impact on implementation and deployment of ITS applications. In this paper, based on recent standardization activities, we give an overview of ITS applications and we detail a classification of road safety applications. Then, we investigate the security issues of cooperative ITS applications and we present their security profiles. Taking into account the communication architecture of an ITS Station, we advance a new application oriented security approach.