There are other features you can use if you're willing to accept a bit of overhead in the name of robustness, namely the code instrumentation feature ('-finstru

There are other features you can use if you're willing to accept a bit of overhead in the name of robustness, namely the code instrumentation feature ('-finstrument-functions') Using that option, you can provide relatively strong stack protection and even a permissions system to restrict parts of your code from accessing others. For even more robustness, you can do random stack offsetting, return value checking, return opcode checking, per-task stack bounds checking, heap metadata protection, heap bounds-check, etc. All this does come at a price tho, every function is instrumented on entry and exit so its not the most performant. It does provide pretty good protection against buffer and stack smashing exploits. Also, since this is an embedded system with a well-defined memory map, you can perform very strong pointer-checks (not simply NULL checks) against exactly the allowed ranges (a simple NULL check has a 1 in 4.2 billion chance of catching an issue).