The Security Hole in WAP: An Analysis of the Network and Business Rationales Underlying a Failure

摘要

To succeed,the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP),a protocol for the delivery of Internet-like services for mobile phones,had to achieve widespread usage on the market for mobile electronic commerce;but a security hole made it unsuitable for e-commerce transactions.The security hole was a byproduct of the so-called WAP-gateway.Mobile service providers offering WAP to their subscribers were supposed to deploy the gateway as a converter between the fixed and mobile networks.The early versions of WAP could not solve the security problem in a way that was satisfactory from both a technical and a business perspective.Although the security weakness was not the main reason that WAP failed,it would probably have caused the protocol suite to fail even if every other problem had been solved.