Vulnerabilities and Open Issues of Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping

Smart Contracts (SCs) are programs stored in a Blockchain to ensure agreements between two or more parties. The combination of factors like the newness of the field, with less than a decade of practical use, and a high and growing popularity in industry, leads to an increase in the possibility of severe security issues occurrence. Even though, systems based on Blockchain and SCs technologies inherit several benefits, like a tamper-proof decentralized ledger and anonymous transactions. This way, even with security issues, the trend is that its popularity will increase. Due the unchangeable essence of Blockchain, failures or errors in SCs become perpetual once published, being critical to mitigate them, since the involvement of huge economic assets are common To handle this, the academic and industrial communities have been expanding their efforts in this field, with a growth in research publications similar to exponential. Aiming at reasoning about the current state-of-art in vulnerabilities and open issues over Blockchain SCs, we conducted a systematic literature mapping over 32 primary and 18 secondary selected articles. As contribution, this work discusses and relates the selected papers, identifying gaps that may lead to research topics for future work.