We consider periodical status updates between a transmitter and a legitimate receiver, in the presence of an eavesdropper that is sometimes able to capture pieces of information. We assume that, in the absence of such a threat, the connection between the transmitter and the receiver is controlled by the transmitter with the aim to minimize the age of information at the receiver's side. However, if the presence of an eavesdropper is known, the transmitter may further tune the generation rate of status updates to trade off the age of information values acquired by the eavesdropper and the receiver, respectively. To analyze this problem, we first propose a metric that combines both objectives according to a Bergson social welfare framework, and then we solve the problem of finding the optimal generation rate as a function of the probability of data capture by the eavesdropper. This enables us to derive notable and sometimes counter-intuitive conclusions, and possibly establish an extension of the age of information framework to security aspects from a performance evaluation perspective.

翻译：我们考虑发射机与合法接收机之间的周期性状态更新，此时存在一个有时能截获信息片段的窃听者。假设在没有此类威胁时，发射机控制连接以最小化接收端的信息年龄。然而，若已知窃听者存在，发射机可进一步调整状态更新的生成速率，从而在窃听者和接收者所获得的信息年龄值之间进行权衡。为分析此问题，我们首先基于伯格森社会福利框架提出一个融合双重目标的度量指标，进而求解以窃听者数据捕获概率为函数的最优生成速率问题。这使我们能够得出显著且有时反直觉的结论，并可能从性能评估角度将信息年龄框架拓展至安全层面。