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From the responses to this stackoverflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1629685/when-and-how-to-u...

The protection only protects under some circumstances not all. So this demo still seems valid. Also the protection comes at a cost of extra code (and extra execution time).

This means to me that any IoT device probably does not have stack protection.

Actually, this demo would be stopped if the stack protector was on. The demo relies upon overwriting the return pointer that controls where the function jumps to upon returning.

The stack protector acts as a guard against overwriting that value without knowing a key that is stored elsewhere in memory. You'd need some memory disclosure issue to get the key or brute force the key.

Depends on which distributions patch gcc to enable it by default. From what I'm aware, a lot of them do, though.

Fedora 20 comes with fstack-protector-strong .. so does ubuntu arch openbsd/freebsd etc .