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The strength of privacy protection in LDP deployments depends on the privacy budget \u025b, and there are several scenarios in which it is desirable for the value of \u025b to remain hidden from untrusted third parties, or the inference of \u025b by an untrusted third party may constitute a privacy leakage. In this article, we propose a new class of attacks called budget inference attacks (BIAs), which enable an adversary to infer the \u025b budget value from the outputs of an LDP protocol. We develop BIAs for two types of adversaries: informed adversaries who have knowledge of the statistical data distribution, and uninformed adversaries who do not. We apply our BIAs on five popular LDP protocols and experimentally evaluate them using multiple datasets, varying \u025b budgets, population sizes, and attack settings and parameters. Results show that our BIAs are highly effective, as they enable the adversary to infer the \u025b value with low errors. We also propose three potential countermeasures against our BIAs. Analyses show that while our countermeasures can be effective in reducing BIA accuracy, they also increase utility loss; therefore, the tradeoff between BIA accuracy and utility loss needs to be carefully considered.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3759250","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,6]],"date-time":"2025-08-06T11:21:55Z","timestamp":1754479315000},"page":"1-32","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Budget Inference Attacks and Countermeasures in Locally Differentially Private Data Collection"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"26","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-3083-0346","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Berkay Kemal","family":"Balioglu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Engineering, Ko\u00e7 University","place":["Istanbul, Turkey"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7676-0167","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Emre","family":"Gursoy","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Engineering, Ko\u00e7 University","place":["Istanbul, Turkey"]}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_3_2_2","unstructured":"2020. 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