The challenging nature of error handling constantly escalates as a growing number of environments consists of networked devices and software components. In these environments, errors cover a uniquely large spectrum of situations related to each layer ranging from hardware to distributed platforms, to software components. Handling errors becomes a daunting task for programmers, whose outcome is unpredictable. Scaling up error handling requires to raise the level of abstraction beyond the code level and the try-catch construct, approaching error handling at the software architecture level.

Developing pervasive computing applications is a difficult task because it requires to deal with a wide range of issues: heterogeneous devices, entity distribution, entity coordination, low-level hardware knowledge. . . Besides requiring various areas of expertise, programming such applications involves writing a lot of administrative code to glue technologies together and to interface with both hardware and software components.

Hackers have been developing fast propagating worms exploiting vulnerabilities that had just been disclosed by security experts. Those attacks particularly expose servers: this class of applications is constantly connected to the Internet and must meet uptime constraints. Hence they often run unprotected until the next scheduled update. In this paper, we propose a just-in-time protection for servers based on runtime injection of pre-made patches. The runtime injection permits to deal with uptime constraints and induces only a minimal overhead over the vulnerable code and only when a vulnerability is known to exist. The pre-made patches forbid exploitation of most common vulnerabilities (45% of attacks reported by Debian security in 2005 affected C software) and allows continuous servicing.