The interconnected nature of devices today poses a major security challenge. A breach on Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem can have far reaching drastic impacts on mainstream systems. Defensive mechanisms are in place at various levels. However, IoT devices are particularly vulnerable due to their resource constrained nature. Buffer overflow attacks utilize vulnerabilities in code to inject malicious code or hijack control. Although countermeasures are available, modern attacks are still able to bypass them. This paper presents an assessment of the built-in defense mechanisms against the code injection and return-to-libc attack on the Kali Linux and Raspbian operating systems. The tradeoff between performance and security has been a challenge for IoT devices. Together with available and new techniques, a balance between the two is needed.