Comments on: RIO: Return Instruction Obfuscation for Bare-Metal IoT Devices with Binary Analysis

TL;DR

This paper critiques the RIO obfuscation technique for IoT devices, revealing vulnerabilities that allow attackers to retrieve return instructions easily and proposing modifications to enhance security.

Contribution

It identifies flaws in RIO's design that compromise its effectiveness and suggests improvements to strengthen return instruction obfuscation.

Findings

Flaws enable easy retrieval of plaintext return instructions

Proposed changes improve RIO's resistance to binary analysis

Highlights need for more robust obfuscation methods

Abstract

This is a comment on "RIO: Return Instruction Obfuscation for Bare-Metal IoT Devices with Binary Analysis". RIO prevents finding gadgets for Return-Oriented Programming attacks by encrypting return instructions. This paper shows flaws in the design of RIO that allow for the easy retrieval of the plaintext return instructions without decrypting them. Additionally, changes are proposed to improve upon the original idea.