Signal-Optimized Device Selection for Distributed Authorized WiFi Security Assessment: A 44 dB Empirical Study on an Indian SME Testbed

The mainstream {WiFi}-security tooling ecosystem (aircrack-ng, hcxdumptool, hashcat) implicitly assumes a single-device operator model. In an Indian small-and-medium-enterprise retrofit-security context, this assumption breaks in a specific way: the site operator already has several heterogeneous compute nodes scattered through the physical premises, each with idiosyncratic WiFi hardware, and the right choice of capture node for a given target access point can make the difference between a successful authorized security assessment and one that fails at the physical layer. We report an empirical measurement from a two-floor Indian pharmaceutical-company office deployment: across six authorized Access Points measured from two fixed nodes (a consumer OpenWrt router on the factory floor and an Intel Core i7-based workstation on the admin floor), the inter-node RSSI delta reaches 44 dB (~25,000x power ratio) for a single target, and the best-node assignment is non-monotonic across the six targets. We describe the measurement methodology, the ARES v2 framework, the hardware-capability matrix across the site's six candidate nodes (including a postmarketOS-flashed OnePlus 6 negative result for monitor-mode injection on the Qualcomm WCN3990), and a simple selection algorithm that ranks candidate nodes by observed RSSI before committing to a capture attempt. Authorization scope is documented explicitly: all measured networks are either operator-owned, consented employee-owned, or passively observed without targeting. BSSIDs and SSIDs in the released data are hashed and redacted respectively. We contribute the authorization-framing template, the empirical-delta finding, the framework architecture, and a replication kit sufficient for other site operators to produce comparable measurements at their own premises.