  This paper presents DAEDALUS, a software diversity-based framework designed
to resist ROP attacks on Linux-based IoT devices. DAEDALUS generates unique,
semantically equivalent but syntactically different rewrites of IoT firmware,
disrupting large-scale replication of ROP attacks. DAEDALUS employs STOKE, a
stochastic optimizer for x86 binaries, as its core diversity engine but
introduces significant extensions to address unique IoT firmware challenges.
DAEDALUS's effectiveness is evaluated using DDoSim, a published botnet DDoS
attack simulation testbed. Results demonstrate that DAEDALUS successfully
neutralizes ROP payloads by diversifying critical basic blocks in the firmware,
preventing attackers from compromising multiple devices for DDoS attacks via
memory error vulnerabilities. The findings indicate that DAEDALUS not only
mitigates the impact of ROP attacks on individual IoT devices through
probabilistic protection but also thwarts large-scale ROP attacks across
multiple devices.
