When a researcher found a way around some of Shield’s protections

In May 2026, independent security researcher 0xobfuscated contacted Promon with a significant piece of research.

After a process of manual reverse engineering, they had developed a technique that could remove Shield protection from a specific protected Android application while leaving the application able to run. Rather than publishing the technique immediately, they contacted us first and shared the information we needed to investigate it.

That decision gave both sides something valuable. 0xobfuscated could publish their research in the knowledge that no end users were impacted. Our Security Research and Engineering teams had time to reproduce the work, understand its scope, strengthen Shield, and make hardened releases available before the technical details became public. We also worked with impacted customers to help them understand how to protect themselves from this technique.

0xobfuscated has now published the full technical analysis on their own blog. Their post owns the reverse-engineering detail. We want to focus on what happened around it, what we changed, and why this kind of independent research makes a difference.

What the researcher found

The technique can be applied to limited Shield for Mobile configurations on Android. Its attack model is important to understand. It is a local repackaging technique, carried out against a copy of the application on a rooted device controlled by the researcher. It does not provide a remote attack path into an application already installed on a user's device. The researcher developed the bypass technique to remove the Shield protection layer while keeping the application running.

Successful removal left a modified application that could continue running without the protection Shield was intended to provide. Promon therefore classifies the finding as a protection-bypass technique rather than a conventional application vulnerability. The specific bypass described in 0xobfuscated's research is now fixed and no longer works against the latest hardened versions of Promon Shield for Mobile™ on Android.

Removing Shield while keeping the application running was not straightforward. The work required manual reverse engineering, a rooted device, purpose-built tooling, and application-specific analysis. Parts of the researcher's tooling can be reused. Each new target may still require application-specific reverse engineering before the technique can be applied.

They came to us before publishing

0xobfuscated didn't immediately place their research online. They contacted Promon and offered to share their methodology, tooling, and draft publication privately. They were also willing to coordinate the timing of publication so that we could assess the impact and address the findings first.

As the work progressed, the researcher continued testing against more recent Shield releases and shared those results with us. Our own research confirmed that the overall methodology required engineering changes.

We also invited 0xobfuscated into our private bug bounty program.

From notification in May to publication in October, the coordinated disclosure period was roughly 138 days. We used that time to investigate the technique, develop and test the engineering changes, and make strengthened releases available before the technical research was published.

The publication timing was coordinated so that customers would have the strengthened protection available before the technical research became public. This also gave customers time to release updated versions of their apps.

At Promon, our job is to protect our customers. An important way to do this is to work with external security professionals and talented individuals to find workarounds, so we can implement protections to avoid our customers falling victim to such techniques.

What we changed

Our Security Research team first established what the technique could and could not do. Engineering then strengthened the areas of Shield that the research had successfully worked around.

Those improvements are included in Promon Shield for Mobile™ on Android 9.0.1 LTS.

The releases became available on September 9, ahead of 0xobfuscated's October 5 publication. Customers were asked to re-shield their applications using the new release and include that build in their next planned application release. There is no need to trigger an emergency release cycle.

The specific bypass method described in the researcher's article doesn't work against these hardened releases.

What the finding means for customers

No application data, user data, credentials, accounts, or backend systems were exposed by this research. Users who installed the authentic application from Google Play or the App Store remain on the genuine, protected application.

It's important to emphasize that technique can't be used remotely to remove Shield from an application already installed on a user's device. Instead, the relevant risk is that someone could take a copy of an Android application, remove its protection, repackage it, and distribute the modified build separately.

The consequences of distributing a modified, unprotected application depend heavily on that application. For a game, the motivation might be cheating, bypassing copy protection or removing advertising. For a banking or payment application, a modified and separately distributed application could instead be used as part of fraud or social engineering.

An app from which Shield has been removed is not made weaker than an application that was never protected in the first place. The protection has been taken away. No new weakness has been introduced into the underlying application.

The impact also depends on how an application is protected, and some Promon Shield for Mobile™ configurations are materially different. Customers should move to one of the following versions now and re-shield at their next planed release:

  • Promon Shield for Mobile™ on Android 9.0.1 (Stable track)

  • Promon Shield for Mobile™ on Android 9.2.0 (Current track) or newer

Customers who need an assessment against their specific configuration can contact their Promon Customer Success representative.

The real measure of application protection is the cost of defeating it

There is a wider point behind this research that we would like to highlight.

Client-side application protection runs on devices that Promon and the application owner don't control. A determined attacker can control the device, inspect the binary, and spend as much time as they choose trying to understand how the protection works. They can also build or use tooling to automate parts of that work.

So, meaningful questions for consideration don't revolve around whether we can claim that protection is impossible to defeat. They are about what it costs the attacker to defeat it.

How much expertise does the attacker need? How much manual work? How much custom tooling? How much of the work can be automated, and what investment does that automation require? How much time does it take before the economics stop making sense?

In this case, the demonstrated technique required a period and process of skilled reverse engineering and application-specific work. Parts of the researcher's tooling are reusable, and fuller automation is possible in principle. Building tooling capable of reliably automating more of the process, however, requires its own investment.

Application protection is designed to make tampering expensive. Each round of internal and independent research, along with the engineering response, helps identify where protection can be strengthened and raises the cost of a future attack.

At Promon, we don't assume that future attacks will always require the same level of manual work. Our job is to keep raising the effort and investment required as attacker tooling and automation evolve. That also means reducing the time it takes to defeat protections, from humans, automation, or AI.

Read more: AI-assisted vulnerability research still requires responsible disclosure

Good research deserves a good response

Security researchers will continue to scrutinize Shield, and the applications it protects. We want them to.

Useful external research gives us a perspective that internal engineering alone can't easily reproduce. It tests the protection against people whose objective is specifically to find a way around it. Promon's private bug bounty program exists in part to recognize that contribution and bring serious external research into our engineering process.

But the relationship has responsibilities on both sides.

0xobfuscated approached us before publishing. They shared enough information for us to reproduce the work. They gave us time to make changes. Their published article deliberately halts before naming the customer, providing ready-to-run attack tooling, or including the application-specific values another target would require.

Our responsibility was to take the work seriously, investigate it, strengthen the product, make those improvements available to customers, and then give the researcher room to publish what they found.

This is exactly the sort of high standard we want to set. When researchers approach us in good faith, we respond in kind.

Read the research

0xobfuscated's technical post dives much deeper into the reverse engineering behind the technique and the different protection mechanisms they examined.

We encourage technically minded readers to read the research directly: Promon: Unprotecting Your Favorite Mobile Game.

Security researchers who want to report a finding to Promon can also read our responsible disclosure guidelines.