Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a set of rules for how data should be sent between mobile devices during wireless communication. An example of this kind of communication is when you use your mobile telephone to access the Internet. The primary security threats when using WAP are various forms of data theft, including account hijacking and identity theft.

When you communicate using WAP, information is sent to a machine, called a gateway, that translates your mobile device's request to the common request format used on the Internet, which is HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). If your communication is not properly secured, your request could be intercepted before it gets to the gateway or tampered with once in the gateway.

WAP was designed to provide services equivalent to a web browser with some modifications to address the limitations of very small portable devices. There are also spin-off technologies of WAP, such as Multimedia Messaging System (MMS). MMS is a combination of WAP and SMS, used to send multimedia content (e.g., images, audio and video clips), as well as text, over wireless networks.

The rules of WAP are internationally agreed upon and are now used for the majority of the world's mobile Internet sites, also known as WAP-sites. The Japanese i-mode system is the other major competing wireless data protocol.