The 10^th Symposium on Distributed Ledger Technology (SDLT 2026)

Welcome to the 10^th Symposium on Distributed Ledger Technology

Distributed Ledger Technology is an emerging technology, which provides the way to store and manage information in a distributed fashion. It enables the creation of decentralized crypto-currencies, smart contracts, eGovernance, supply chain management, eVoting etc over a network of computer systems without any human intervention. Unprecedented reliability and security over other cryptographic schemes has expanded the application domains of blockchain including financial services, real estate, stock exchange, identity management, supply chain, and Internet of Things.

The goal of this symposium is to provide a forum for researchers, business leaders and policy makers in this area to carefully analyse current systems or propose new solutions creating a scientific background for a solid development of innovative Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) applications.

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Keynote Speakers

Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Professor, IIT Kharagpur, India

Blockchain for Securing the Silicon Supply Chain: From Traceability to Hardware-Rooted Trust

Abstract. The globalization and fragmentation of semiconductor manufacturing have created significant challenges in establishing trust across the silicon supply chain, exposing integrated circuits to counterfeiting, overproduction, recycling, cloning, tampering, and unauthorized modification. This keynote will examine the emerging role of blockchain as a foundation for establishing verifiable provenance and accountability across the lifecycle of a chip—from design and fabrication through assembly, distribution, deployment, and end-of-life. Building on blockchain-based traceability frameworks and hardware-rooted approaches using physically unclonable functions (PUFs), the talk will explore how immutable distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and unique silicon identities can be combined to connect digital supply-chain records with physical devices. The discussion will further consider emerging challenges in FPGA and heterogeneous/3D-IC supply chains, where multiple manufacturing ecosystems and trust domains must interact. Finally, the keynote will highlight open research questions concerning scalability, privacy, interoperability, data authenticity, and the practical deployment of blockchain-based trust infrastructures for a secure semiconductor supply chain.

Bio. Rajat Subhra Chakraborty is currently the Susanta Kumar Gupta Chair Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of IIT Kharagpur, where he has been working since 2010. He has professional experience of working at Intel (Bangalore, India), National Semiconductor (Bangalore, India) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) (Santa Clara, USA). His research interests include Hardware Security, VLSI Design and Design Automation, Digital Content Protection and Digital Image Forensics. He holds 2 Granted U.S. patents, 3 granted Indian patents, and has co-authored 6 books, 10 book chapters, and over 170 publications in international journals and conferences. His work has received close to 9000 citations till date, and has won 2 Best Paper awards. He has received several prestigious national and international recognitions and awards, e.g., IIT Kharagpur Outstanding Faculty Award, IEI Young Engineers Award, IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award, Royal Academy of Engineering (U.K.) RECI Fellowship and IBM Faculty Award. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Nature Scientific Reports journal; has previously been an Associate Editor of the IEEE TCAD and IEEE TMSCS journals, and regularly serves on the program committee of leading international conferences. Prof. Chakraborty is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Senior Member of ACM. He currently holds the position of Chair of the IEEE Kharagpur Section.

Dennis Desmond, Chief Technology Officer, RAVINN, Australia

Defending the Truth: Distributed Ledgers as an Evidence Layer for AI-Era Cybersecurity

Abstract. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in both offensive and defensive cyber operations, a new security problem is emerging: how can defenders trust the integrity of the evidence used to detect, reconstruct and respond to attacks when the systems generating that evidence may themselves be manipulated? Contemporary security architectures rely heavily on telemetry generated by SIEM, SOAR, EDR, IDS/IPS, cloud platforms, identity systems, IoT and operational technology environments. These systems provide the evidentiary basis for automated detection and response, yet they generally operate on the assumption that their logs, alerts, rules and decision records remain trustworthy. This keynote explores the proposition that DLT can provide an independent, tamper-evident evidence layer for AI-era cybersecurity. Rather than replacing existing security technologies, a permissioned distributed ledger could cryptographically anchor selected security events, alert metadata, model decisions, policy states and response actions, creating a distributed record that is substantially more resistant to retrospective manipulation. Such an architecture could preserve provenance, sequencing, integrity and accountability across complex security environments while allowing high-volume operational telemetry to remain in conventional storage. The presentation will examine the technical viability of this approach, including the use of cryptographic hashes, digital signatures, hardware-rooted identity, attestation, consensus mechanisms and off-chain data architectures. It will also address critical limitations, including compromised sensors, false but validly signed telemetry, key compromise, validator trust, privacy, throughput, latency and governance.

Bio. Dr Dennis Desmond is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at RAVINN and an Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC). He has more than 25 years of experience in cyber security, cyber intelligence, counterintelligence, digital identity operations, and emerging technologies. Before joining RAVINN, Dr Desmond served in a range of intelligence and security roles, including positions with the U.S. Army, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the U.S. Department of Defense. He is recognized for his expertise in cyber threat intelligence, blockchain technologies, cryptocurrency investigations, darknet intelligence, and digital forensics. He has also taught and led university programs in cyber security, digital forensics, artificial intelligence, cryptography, blockchain, and FinTech.

Paper Submissions

Researchers and industry practitioners are invited to submit proposals via this LINK.

Authors are advised to prepare their manuscripts in line with the Springer conference format guidelines available here. Due to the double-blind review process, authors should not include their names or affiliations in the paper. Accepted papers will be published in the Springer's CCIS series.

For the Academic Track submit a single column paper within 15 pages excluding references and appendix.

For the Industry Track, submit either a single-column full paper of up to 12 pages or a single-column short paper of 6 pages.

For the Industry Talk, submit an abstract and a brief outline of the talk (will not be published).

Organising Committee

General Chairs

Salil Kanhere, University of New South Wales, Australia
Priyanka Singh, The University of Queensland, Australia
Shantanu Pal, Deakin University, Australia

Program Chairs

Helen Paik, University of New South Wales, Australia
Xue Li, The University of Queensland, Australia
Volkan Dedeoglu, CSIRO (Data61), Australia

Academic Chairs

Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Pradeep K. Atrey, State University of New York, Albany, USA
Babu Pillai, Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE

Local Chairs

Gagandeep Singh, The University of Queensland, Australia
Zahra Jadidi, Griffith University, Australia

Industry Chairs

Shiping Chen, CSIRO (Data61), Australia
Paul Ashley, Anonyome Labs, Australia

Publicity Chairs

Vishwas Patil, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
Dora Zelenyanszki, Griffith University, Australia

Web Chairs

Narayan Ranjan Chakrabarty, Australian Catholic University, Australia
Awarjana Perera, Griffith University, Australia

Technical Programme Committee

Abigail Koay, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
Babu Pillai, Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE
David Hyland-Wood, Griffith Queensland, Australia
Dileepa Fernando, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Dorottya Zelenyanszki, Griffith University, Australia
Ed Young, Crystal Delta, Australia
Ermyas Abebe, ConsenSys, Australia
Guangdong Bai, The University of Queensland, Australia
Gowri Ramachandran, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Helen Paik, University of New South Wales, Australia
Jubilant Job, Southern Cross University, Australia
Jubilant Kizhakkethottam, Saintgits College of Engineering, India
Joanne Fuller, ConsenSys, Australia
Kamanashis Biswas, Australian Catholic University, Australia
Katrina Donaghy, Civic Ledger, Australia
Kulani Mahadewa, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Marius Portmann, The University of Queensland, Australia
Mark Utting, The University of Queensland, Australia
Md Sadek Ferdous, Imperial College London, UK
Md Whaiduzzaman, Torrens Univeristy, Australia
Mohammad Jabed M. Chowdhury, La Trobe University, Australia
Muhammad Usman, Edge Hill University, UK
Naipeng Dong, The University of Queensland, Australia
Nathan Churchward, Cuscal Limited, Australia
Niaz Chowdhury, CSIRO, Australia
Peter Robinson, Immutable, Australia
Qiang Tang, University of Sydney, Australia
Raja Jurdak, Queensland Univeristy of Technology, Australia
Ranju Mandal, Torrens University, Australia
RK Shyamasundar, IIT-Bombay, India
Salil Kanhere, University of New South Wales, Australia
Samantha Tharani Jeyakumar, Griffith University, Australia
Sandra Johnson, ConsenSys, Australia
Shantanu Pal, Deakin University, Australia
Shiping Chen, Data61-CSIRO, Australia
Son Hoang, RMIT University, Australia
Shoufeng Cao, The University of Queensland, Australia
Sujit Biswas, City Univeersity of London, UK
Thanh-Hai Tran, ConsenSys, Australia
Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy, Griffith Univeristy, Australia
Vishwas Patil, IIT-Bombay, India
Warwick Powell, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Xin-Wen Wu, University of Mary Washington, USA
Yinxing Xue, University of Science and Technology of China, China
Zaidul Karim, CSIRO, Australia
Zhe Hou, Griffith University, Australia