Tamper-resistant code using optimal ROP gadgets for IoT devices

IoT is an emerging area with revolutionary applications in areas like transportation, health care, energy, and agriculture etc. It can be realized through the massive deployment of IoT devices in the physical world. But massive deployment comes with severe security concerns. IoT devices are capable of running operating systems within themselves. An adversary may tamper or clone these IoT devices for his or her benefit. Most of the modern operating systems today use attack prevention techniques based on No-eXecute (NX) memory page protection scheme, which prevents execution of malicious code injected into the device. But, Return Oriented Programming (ROP) has the capability to break this security cover and take control over the IoT device. In this paper we present an effective implementation of the ROP, used as a defensive weapon against code tampering by adversaries. We also propose techniques to choose the best gadget set for building the ROP chain.