Given the continuous development of urban areas, integrated policies are needed to improve the lives of urban residents by implementing integrated, interoperable and secure electronic services. Public administrations recognize the potential of blockchain in solving the problems of local communities. Blockchain, initially perceived through its association with cryptocurrency bitcoin, offers an innovative perspective on how smart cities can be organized and a more transparent economic model for resource management. This study analyses how blockchain technology-based services can contribute to the development of smart cities and proposes a Smart City ecosystem model based on SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity) authentication model and smart contracts between entities, citizens and administrations. It also overviews the domains in which this technology can be used. The results can be a starting point for the development of local initiatives for using the blockchain as a platform for communications and transactions in the public sector.

The Once-Only Principle states that citizens and businesses provide data only once in contact with public administrations. So far, many European countries have started to implement the Once-Only Principle at national level, but its cross-border implementation is still fragmented and limited. This paper presents the development of a Reference Architecture for the Once-Only Principle in Europe. The case study, stemming from the EU-funded Once-Only Principle project (TOOP) highlights the challenges faced by the architecture team when developing the Reference Architecture that tackles the Once-Only Principle across different countries and policy domains. The architecture is not built from scratch, but re-uses and enhances already available building blocks in order to seamlessly preserve interoperability and to comply with regulations and existing technical standards, leaving at the same time enough space for vendors and open source developers to propose their compliant solutions, whatever is their business model.

Raising awareness of cybersecurity issues and improving the digital literacy and skills in terms of recognition and management of threats is considered as a high-priority action. Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) provides several benefits, including greater efficiency and open access to applications, services, and information, but their very openness creates unique and significant security challenges for organizations. SOA principles are widely used because they provide loose-coupling, service automation, extensible architecture and enhanced reuse. This paper addresses the security challenges of SOA considering their business and technical impact and performs a mapping to mitigation measures and tools. The process involves identifying the main security vulnerabilities and researching solutions for cyber attacks prevention. It also proposes business level measures to mitigate cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities in SOAs. Several European projects and open source solutions whose aim is to ensure the security and the privacy of SOA are identified, analyzed and proposed as tools for enhanced security in the second part of the paper.

Abstract:The work presented in this paper highlights the continuous improvement that has been made in terms of economic competitiveness of the European companies, with an emphasis on Small and Medium -sized Enterprises (SME's) by enabling all businesses -national and European -to benefit from available, efficient and interoperable electronic procedures.

Automation in testing user interfaces is a prerequisite for overcoming the major weaknesses of manual testing, such as time consumption, not being able to reproduce the sequence that generates a bug or the tendency to repeat only the successful steps. Continuous testing represents an important step in the agile software development cycle because any features and changes added to the code need to be checked before their propagation to production environment. Manually testing is a resource and time-consuming process thus the solution would be to make the entire workflow from committing a change to publishing a new release completely automated. The solution proposed within this paper is a framework for automated code testing and bug prevention that relies on Selenium, a framework supporting also headless testing, integrated with a Continuous Integration (CI) server such as Jenkins.