2026-edorh-shieldshare
ShieldShare: Building a VPN-backed Android Hotspot for Secure Internet Sharing with Per-User Traffic Accounting
canonical link → · arxiv: 2605.01569
Abstract
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have become essential privacy tools
for mobile users, yet current implementations face significant
limitations in shared environments. Mainstream VPN providers impose
device limits, while Android's native hotspot functionality lacks
support for routing shared traffic through VPN connections. Existing
solutions either require root access or lack comprehensive monitoring
capabilities. This paper presents ShieldShare, a proxy-based Android
application that enables secure VPN-backed hotspot sharing with
per-user traffic accounting without requiring root access. The
system employs a modular architecture comprising VPN detection,
hotspot management, proxy-based traffic forwarding (HTTP, HTTPS,
SOCKS5), and traffic metering with quota management. Released as
open-source.
Team notes
Engineering contribution to VPN deployment rather than circumvention
protocol research — borderline corpus relevance, but the no-root
Android-hotspot pattern is operationally interesting for community
proxy deployment in censored environments. Auto-ingested by
corpus-crawl; tags reviewed and tightened by hand (LLM had defaulted
techniques to "dpi" which doesn't apply here).