UNMASKING WI-FI MISUSE: FORENSIC STRATEGIES FOR IEEE 802.11 NETWORKS

IEEE 802.11 is the dominant technology for wireless local area networking across consumer, enterprise, and embedded domains.Contemporary deployments incorporate WPA3, Protected Management Frames (PMF), and increasingly strict privacy controls such as MAC address randomization-factors that complicate attribution and evidence collection compared to legacy WLANs.This paper foregrounds these modern constraints and presents a practitioner-oriented methodology for acquiring, preserving, and analyzing wireless evidence that remains forensically sound and legally defensible.We synthesize live and post-event techniques, discuss capture strategies and tooling, enumerate device-specific artifacts, and provide a comparative analysis of legacy vs. modern WLAN forensics.Our framing builds on prior work that systematized Wi-Fi misuse categories and evidence sources, extending it for today's encrypted and privacy-preserving environments [4]-[6].