Objective-c – Workaround to accomplish protected properties in Objective-C

I've been trying to find a workaround to declare @protected properties in Objective-C so only subclasses in the hierarchy can access them (read only, not write).
I read that there is no documented way of doing this so I thought of this workaround and I wanted to ask StackOverflow's opinion about it.

Every custom class at the top of the hierarchy contains three classes, one implementation and two interfaces.
Let's name them:

ClassA.h
ClassA_protected.h
ClassA.m

Then any subclass of this ClassA would be as usual:

ClassB.h
ClassB.m

First I created the interface ClassA.h where I declare a protected int variable so any subclass of ClassA can have access to it:

@interface ClassA : NSObject{
    @protected
    int _myProtectedInt;
}
@end

Next step is the workaround I was talking about. However, once you read it you will see that it is quite straight forward. I declared a second interface called ClassA_protected.h which actually works as an extension of ClassA.h and allows us to tag the property as readonly:

#import "ClassA.h"
@interface ClassA ()
@property (nonatomic , readonly) int myProtectedInt;
@end

Last step of preparing the protected hierarchy is to declare its implementation in ClassA.m where we only synthesize our property:

#import "ClassA_protected.h"
@implementation ClassA
@synthesize myProtectedInt = _ myProtectedInt;
@end

This way, every class that needs to be a subclass of ClassA.h, will import ClassA_protected.h instead. So a child like, for example ClassB.h, would be as follows:

#import "ClassA_protected.h"
@interface ClassB : ClassA
@end

And an example of accessing this property from ClassB.m's implementation:

@implementation ClassB
-(void) method {
    //edit protected variable 
    _myProtectedInt= 1;

    //normal access
    self.muProtectedInt;
}
@end