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

To succeed commercially, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), a protocol for the delivery of Internet-like services for mobile phones, had to dominate 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