As far as I understood, this attack has no client-side mitigation that could be employed other than treating every wifi as an open network. The attack might already be known to hostile actors or may have become known during the embargo, but full disclosure without an embargo would guarantee that clients are at risk without mitigation. An embargo at least gives time to prep patches and protect at least a portion of the clients.
Either there is a possibility for patches to be prepared during an embargo or there is “no client-side mitigation”, you can’t have both. From reading the rest of this thread, it appears that it is quite possible to patch this on clients such that, if you are using a patched client, you are safe. Disclosing earlier would have lead to more people having patched clients earlier and hence being safe.
Patching the client is a fix. Mitigation would bea config setting that makes me safer (disable some unused functionality,...). So yes, you can have both.
That’s like saying that prior to introducing seatbelts, we should have allowed for a period of time to glue people to their seats because it is preferable to have a mitigation they can apply themselves than a fix the manufacturer has to put in.
If you don’t limit mitigation to "a config setting" (and why would you?!), a patch/new version is the best mitigation you can get.
I limit mitigation to a config setting because that’s what affected clients can do in this case. Everyone patching wpa_supplicant on their android handset is just not going to happen and it takes time for vendors to roll out patches.
> As far as I understood, this attack has no client-side mitigation that could be employed other than treating every wifi as an open network.
I've been doing that for years and recommend others do so as well.
The rise of HTTPS nearly everywhere helps mitigate things a bit. This same type of exploit 5 years ago would wreak havoc exploited at the local Starbucks WiFI.
