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Record W4408215908 · doi:10.56553/popets-2025-0055

Private Shared Random Minimum Spanning Forests

2025· article· en· W4408215908 on OpenAlexafffund
M. J. Dietz, Florian Kerschbaum

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicOptimization and Search Problems
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaGovernment of OntarioRoyal Bank of Canada
KeywordsSpanning treeBusinessMathematicsCombinatorics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Finding the Minimum Spanning Tree or Forest (MSF) of a weighted graph is one of the most fundamental graph problems. It has many applications, and there are various algorithms to solve it in quasi-linear time. However, in a secure computation setting where the graph is shared between multiple parties, there are no fully satisfactory solutions. Any prior work on this problem either builds a circuit that is fed into a generic multi-party computation protocol, or is limited to graphs that have a unique MSF. In this work, we first identify privacy and fairness issues that arise when the MSF is not necessarily unique, i.e., there exist duplicate edge weights. Subsequently, we consider the notion of a Random Minimum Spanning Forest, which defines a distribution of the desired output in the case where multiple MSFs exist. We carefully design a protocol for this problem in the semi-honest security model. The main insight of our protocol is that we may reveal certain intermediate results over the entire course of the protocol execution (provably without impacting security), which are then used to make decisions that optimize efficiency. No party learns anything about the inputs of other parties except for the produced MSF, not even the number of input edges. Furthermore, the number of communication rounds is low for many typical graphs, which allows running the protocol even when the network latency is high. Our evaluation shows that, depending on the graph structure and its weight distribution, our protocol can outperform the previous baseline by Laud (PoPETs 2015) by up to 2-3 orders of magnitude in terms of running time. From another perspective, this work exposes some disadvantages of using generic compilers to obtain MPC protocols, as their efficiency always equal that of the worst-case input. Our techniques show that even within the context of MPC, it is possible to obtain a secure protocol whose running time is not fixed a-priori, but instead determined by the output that is not known in advance. By carefully studying the desired functionality, this allows for significant efficiency improvements for any realistic inputs.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.736
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0030.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.273
Teacher spread0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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