  The ever growing software complexity suggests that they will never be bugfree
and therefore secure. Software compagnies regulary publish updates. But maybe
because of lack of time or care or maybe because stopping application is
annoying, such updates are rarely if ever deployed on users' machines. We
propose an integrated tool allowing system administrators to deploy critical
security updates on the fly on applications running remotly without end-user
intervention. Our approach is based on an aspect weaving system, Arachne, that
dynamicaly rewrites binary code. Hence updated applications are still running
while they are updated. Our second tool Minerve integrates Arachne within the
standart updating process: Minerve takes a patch produced by dif and eventually
builds a dynamic patch that can later be woven to update the application on the
fly. In addition, Minerve allows to consult patches translated in a dedicated
language and hence eases auditing tasks.
