As Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, it is my honour to select the recipient of the annual Wilkes Award, awarded to the authors of the best paper published in the previous year’s volume. This year, rather than a short announcement, I have marked the 2026 Award with a full editorial in the journal itself; what follows draws on that piece.
The Award is named after Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng (1913-2010), Director of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory during the formative period of stored-program computing. His contributions spanned the development of EDSAC, which ran the first realistic programs on a stored-program electronic computer in 1949, the invention of microprogramming, the formalisation of labels and macros in assembly programming, and, with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, the early systematic treatment of subroutines as the basis for structured programming. Wilkes was also the founding President of the British Computer Society (1957-60), received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1967, and was knighted for his services to computing in 2000. The Award therefore commemorates not only a pioneer of computing, but a particular ideal of research: work that combines conceptual originality, technical precision, and lasting disciplinary significance. Each year, shortlisted papers are considered against that ambition, in terms of their technical quality, knowledge of the field, rigour of argument, originality, clarity of presentation, and the overall quality of treatment.
It is therefore a particular pleasure to announce that the 2026 Wilkes Award, recognising work published in Volume 68 (2025), is made to Shihan Qin, Yuting Xiao, Yansen Xin, Birou Gao and Rui Zhang, with Cenman Wang, Ye Tian, Yiwen Wu and Xinming Zhang as runner-up. Both papers were outstanding contributions to a strong field, and the final decision was closely balanced. The winning paper stood out for its technical depth, formal rigour, originality, and potential to influence future work.
Winning paper
Practical and veritable threshold multi-factor authentication for mobile devices
Shihan Qin, Yuting Xiao, Yansen Xin, Birou Gao and Rui Zhang
The Computer Journal, Volume 68, Issue 7 (July 2025), pp.749-762
https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxaf001
Multi-factor authentication has become a central mechanism for strengthening security across digital systems, especially where users, devices and services interact in increasingly mobile and distributed environments. Yet conventional approaches typically require a user to present a fixed combination of factors. The resulting schemes may be secure, but they can also be brittle: if a mandatory password is forgotten, a specific device is unavailable, or a biometric input cannot be used, authentication fails. This is as much a socio-technical concern as a cryptographic one, since the usability failure modes matter to real users just as the security properties do. Threshold approaches seek to address this by permitting a user to authenticate with any t of n registered factors. As Qin and colleagues show, however, prior threshold schemes have often retained important practical limitations: a dependence on multiple devices, reliance on a fixed mandatory factor, restricted factor types, and client-side computation costs that grow with the threshold.
The significance of the winning paper lies in the precision with which it identifies and resolves this problem. The authors develop what they term a veritable threshold construction: one in which users may select any t of n registered factors, without reliance on a fixed factor, without requiring multiple devices, and without restricting the types of factor that may participate. Here veritable is used in a precise technical sense, describing a scheme that genuinely realises the threshold model rather than approximating it while retaining a covert mandatory factor. The contribution is therefore conceptual as well as technical: it sharpens the problem definition, exposes the limitations of earlier approaches, and provides a construction that more fully matches the security and usability motivations of the threshold idea.
That conceptual advance is matched by the paper’s formal strength. The authors establish a security model for threshold multi-factor authenticated key exchange, specify the relevant adversarial capabilities, and develop a generic construction from oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, symmetric authenticated key exchange, and secret sharing. The resulting protocol is analysed against a demanding set of properties, including mutual authentication, session-key security, factor privacy, and forward security. This formal architecture is part of what gives the construction its weight: rather than proposing only a plausible mechanism, the paper sets out a disciplined framework within which the construction can be understood, assured, and extended. Its treatment of efficiency is especially notable. To instantiate the construction for mobile and resource-constrained settings, the authors develop a batched pseudorandom function that reduces the client-side cost from growing with the threshold to a constant, requiring only two exponentiations for the client, and support this with a JavaScript implementation and experimental evidence of substantial client-side savings against the prior comparator. Its cryptographic ideas are developed with an eye to the practical barriers that often determine whether stronger authentication is usable in real systems, and it is that combination of precise problem formulation, ambitious technical contribution, and likely influence on subsequent work that makes it a deserving recipient of the Award.
Runner-up
Confluence: improving network monitoring accuracy on multi-pipeline data plane
Cenman Wang, Ye Tian, Yiwen Wu and Xinming Zhang
The Computer Journal, Volume 68, Issue 9 (September 2025), pp.1315-1328
https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxaf039
The runner-up paper is also a distinguished contribution. Modern programmable switches increasingly rely on multiple independent pipelines to sustain high packet-processing rates, yet many network-measurement systems are designed around a single logical pipeline. Wang and colleagues identify the resulting architectural mismatch and show how naively deploying parallel sketch instances across pipelines can produce poor accuracy under multi-path routing. Their system, Confluence, introduces carefully designed data structures and update mechanisms that accumulate short-term traffic statistics in ingress pipelines and transfer them efficiently to the egress pipelines responsible for monitoring the relevant flows, without resorting to the packet cloning and recirculation that a previous approach depended on. A further contribution is a register-access-respecting algorithm for resolving the circular dependency this creates, for which the authors provide a correctness proof. The paper combines a compelling systems problem, a theoretical analysis of accuracy bounds, close attention to commodity hardware constraints, and an assessment on a hardware programmable switch, moving from problem identification through theoretical characterisation to hardware validation with unusual clarity. That discipline of argument made it a very close contender for this year’s Award.
The two papers recognised this year sit comfortably within the varied and distinguished recent history of the Award. The 2025 Award recognised work on approximation algorithms for maximum weighted internal spanning trees in regular graphs and their subdivisions, with a runner-up contribution on dynamic compact data structures for temporal reachability. The 2024 Award recognised work on near real-time human proximity estimation using computer vision, with application to urban environments. Recent winners have also included work on wireless networks, distributed mobile robots, Internet of Things routing, graph theory, and biological sequence comparison. This diversity is not incidental. It reflects the breadth of The Computer Journal itself, and the journal’s long-standing role in publishing significant work across theory, systems, networking, computational intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, security, and privacy.
That breadth remains central to the journal’s purpose. Just as importantly, the journal continues to emphasise that contributions should be more than technically competent: they should make a non-trivial advance, be grounded in the state of the art, and offer clear value to the research community and to society at large. This reflects the wider mission of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT: making IT good for society. The Wilkes Award is valuable because it makes those standards visible. It is a commendation for a single paper, but it is also an annual opportunity to reflect on the kinds of work a serious computer science journal should seek to recognise: research that is precise rather than fashionable, and technically ambitious without losing sight of significance.
I warmly congratulate the authors of both papers. You can browse previous winners of the Wilkes Award, and find out more about the Award itself. I also thank the Deputy Editors and the 2026 Wilkes Award judging panel for their careful reading and thoughtful advice in a particularly strong year:
- Professor Chris Mitchell, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
- Professor Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK
- Dr Nicky Danino, Leeds Trinity University, UK
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