Is the Canary Dead?

Is the Canary Dead? On the Effectiveness of Stack Canaries on Microcontroller Systems

We analyze the implementation of stack canaries across microcontroller libraries, compilers, and RTOSs, finding them generally less secure than their microprocessor counterparts due to weak randomness, global canary reuse, and limited entropy sources.

May 2024 · Xi Tan, Sagar Mohan, Md Armanuzzaman, Zheyuan Ma, Gaoxiang Liu, Alex Eastman, Hongxin Hu, Ziming Zhao