Susceptibility of Age of Gossip to Timestomping

We consider a fully connected network consisting of a source that maintains the current version of a file, n nodes that use asynchronous gossip mechanisms to disseminate fresh information in the network, and an adversary who infects the packets at a target node through data timestamp manipulation, with the intent to replace circulation of fresh packets with outdated packets in the network. We show that a single infected node increases the expected age of a fully connected network from O(log n) to O(n). Further, we show that the optimal behavior for an adversary is to reset the timestamps of all outgoing packets to the current time and of all incoming packets to an outdated time. Additionally, if the adversary allows the infected node to accept a small fraction of incoming packets from the network, then a large network can manage to curb the spread of stale files coming from the infected node and pull the network age back to O(log n). Lastly, we show that if an infected node contacts only a single node instead of all nodes of the network, the system age can still be degraded to O(n). These show that fully connected nature of a network can be both a benefit and a detriment for information freshness; full connectivity, while enabling fast dissemination of information, also enables fast dissipation of adversarial inputs.