Revisiting Locally Differentially Private Protocols: Towards Better Trade-offs in Privacy, Utility, and Attack Resistance

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong privacy protection, especially in settings in which the server collecting the data is untrusted. However, designing LDP mechanisms that achieve an optimal trade-off between privacy, utility and robustness to adversarial inference attacks remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a general multi-objective optimization framework for refining LDP protocols, enabling the joint optimization of privacy and utility under various adversarial settings. While our framework is flexible to accommodate multiple privacy and security attacks as well as utility metrics, in this paper, we specifically optimize for Attacker Success Rate (ASR) under \emph{data reconstruction attack} as a concrete measure of privacy leakage and Mean Squared Error (MSE) as a measure of utility. More precisely, we systematically revisit these trade-offs by analyzing eight state-of-the-art LDP protocols and proposing refined counterparts that leverage tailored optimization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed adaptive mechanisms consistently outperform their non-adaptive counterparts, achieving substantial reductions in ASR while preserving utility, and pushing closer to the ASR-MSE Pareto frontier. By bridging the gap between theoretical guarantees and real-world vulnerabilities, our framework enables modular and context-aware deployment of LDP mechanisms with tunable privacy-utility trade-offs.

@article{arcolezi2025_2503.01482,
  title={ Revisiting Locally Differentially Private Protocols: Towards Better Trade-offs in Privacy, Utility, and Attack Resistance },
  author={ Héber H. Arcolezi and Sébastien Gambs },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01482},
  year={ 2025 }
}