The research presented aims to investigate the relationship between privacy and anonymisation in blockchain technologies on different fields of application. The study is carried out through a systematic literature review in different databases, obtaining in a first phase of selection 199 publications, of which 28 were selected for data extraction. The results obtained provide a strong relationship between privacy and anonymisation in most of the fields of application of blockchain, as well as a description of the techniques used for this purpose, such as Ring Signature, homomorphic encryption, k-anonymity or data obfuscation. Among the literature researched, some limitations and future lines of research on issues close to blockchain technology in the different fields of application can be detected. As conclusion, we extract the different degrees of application of privacy according to the mechanisms used and different techniques for the implementation of anonymisation, being one of the risks for privacy the traceability of the operations.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has attracted the attention of the scientific community and companies, as proven by the exponential growth of publications on this topic in recent years. This growing interest is mainly due to the promise that the use of blockchain enables it to be verified, without including any trusted intermediaries, that the information received from the network is authentic and up-to-date. In this respect, blockchain is a distributed database that can be seen as a ledger that records all transactions that have ever been executed. In this context, smart contracts are pieces of software used to facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation of a transaction on a blockchain platform. These pieces of software are implemented by using programming languages, which are sometimes provided by the blockchain platforms themselves. This study aims to (1) identify and categorise the state-of-the-art related to smart contract languages, in terms of the existing languages and their main features, and (2) identify new research opportunities. The review has been conducted as a multivocal mapping study that follows the guidelines proposed by Garousi et al. for conducting multivocal literature reviews, as well as the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters for conducting mapping studies. As a result of the implementation of the review protocol, 4,119 papers were gathered, and 109 of them were selected for extraction. The contributions of this article are twofold: (1) 101 different smart contract languages have been identified and classified according to a variety of criteria; (2) a discussion on the findings and their implications for future research have been outlined. As a conclusion, it could be stated that a rigorous and replicable overview of the state-of-the-art of smart contract languages has been provided that can benefit not only researchers but also practitioners in the field, thanks to its multivocal nature.
Cybersecurity attacks affect the compliance of cybersecurity policies of the organisations. Such disadvantages may be due to the absence of security configurations or the use of default configuration values of software products and systems. The complexity in the configuration of products and systems is a known challenge in the software industry since it includes a wide range of parameters to be taken into account. In other contexts, the configuration problems are solved using Software Product Lines. This is the reason why in this article the framework Cybersecurity Software Product Line (CyberSPL) is proposed. CyberSPL is based on a methodology to design product lines to verify cybersecurity policies according to the possible configurations. The patterns to configure the systems related to the cybersecurity aspects are grouped by defining various feature models. The automated analysis of these models allows us to diagnose possible problems in the security configurations, reducing or avoiding them. As support for this proposal, a multi-user and multi-platform solution has been implemented, enabling setting a catalogue of public or private feature models. Moreover, analysis and reasoning mechanisms have been integrated to obtain all the configurations of a model, to detect if a configuration is valid or not, including the root cause of problems for a given configuration. For validating the proposal, a real scenario is proposed where a catalogue of four different feature models is presented. In this scenario, the models have been analysed, different configurations have been validated, and several configurations with problems have been diagnosed.