Timestomping Vulnerability of Age-Sensitive Gossip Networks
Priyanka Kaswan, Sennur Ulukus

TL;DR
This paper investigates how an adversary manipulating timestamps in gossip networks can significantly degrade information freshness, with effects varying based on network topology, highlighting vulnerabilities in fully connected networks and resilience in ring structures.
Contribution
It introduces a detailed analysis of timestamp-based attacks on age-sensitive gossip networks, revealing how topology influences vulnerability and demonstrating the potential for severe age degradation.
Findings
In fully connected networks, a single infected node can increase age from O(log n) to O(n).
In ring networks, the adversarial impact is limited, maintaining an age of O(√n) for most nodes.
Optimal adversarial strategy involves resetting timestamps to outdated values to prevent fresh information flow.
Abstract
We consider gossip networks consisting of a source that maintains the current version of a file, nodes that use asynchronous gossip mechanisms to disseminate fresh information in the network, and an oblivious 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at a target node through data timestamp manipulation, with the intent to replace circulation of fresh packets with outdated packets in the network.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 demonstrate how network topology capacitates an adversary to influence age scaling in a network. We show that in a fully connected network, a single infected node increases the expected age from to . 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an adversary is to reset the timestamps of all outgoing packets to the current time and of all incoming packets to an outdated time for the infected node; thereby preventing any fresh information to go into the infected node, and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAge of Information Optimization · Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
