Obasco Group ´Ecole des Mines de Nantes, INRIA

Due to its ever growing complexity, software is and will prob-ably never be 100 % bug-free and secure. Therefore in most cases, software companies publish updates regularly. For the lack of time or care, or maybe because stopping an applica-tion is annoying, such updates are rarely, if ever, deployed on users ' machines. We propose an integrated tool allowing system administra-tors to deploy critical security updates on the y on appli-cations running remotely and without the intervention of the end-user. Our approach is based on Arachne, an as-pect weaving system that dynamically rewrites binary code. Hence applications are still running while they are updated. Our second tool Minerve integrates Arachne within the stan-dard updating process: Minerve takes a patch produced by diff, a tool that lists textual dierences between two ver-sions of a le, and eventually builds a dynamic patch that can later be woven to update the application on the y. In addition, by translating patches into aspects and thus gener-ating a more abstract presentation of the changes, Minerve eases auditing tasks. 1