ShieldShare: Building a VPN-backed Android Hotspot for Secure Internet Sharing with Per-User Traffic Accounting

2026-05-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitation of existing Android hotspot implementations, which cannot share encrypted VPN traffic and often impose device restrictions while lacking root-free, fine-grained user-level traffic control. We propose and implement a proxy-based, rootless Android application that, for the first time, enables multi-user VPN hotspot sharing with precise per-user traffic accounting on non-rooted devices. The system employs a modular architecture integrating VPN detection, hotspot management, HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 proxy forwarding, and fine-grained bandwidth metering to reliably route all hotspot client traffic through the VPN tunnel and accurately log individual user consumption. Designed with security, auditability, and deployability in mind, our solution offers journalists and activists in high-censorship environments a low-cost, secure access method, and the implementation is publicly open-sourced.

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. Our system employs a modular architecture comprising VPN detection, hotspot management, proxy-based traffic forwarding supporting HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5, and comprehensive traffic metering with quota management. Our evaluation shows that ShieldShare reliably routes client traffic through VPN tunnels while maintaining accurate per-client bandwidth allocation and accounting. This enables affordable, community-controlled secure access in censored or high-surveillance environments, benefiting activists, investigative journalists, and shared household networks. We release ShieldShare as open-source software to support further research and real-world deployment.

Problem

• VPN
• Android hotspot
• traffic accounting
• secure sharing
• per-user monitoring

Innovation

• VPN-backed hotspot
• per-user traffic accounting
• proxy-based forwarding
• Android privacy
• quota management