To protect against spam attacks, Lightning nodes will only relay gossip messages from nodes that have at least one public channel, meaning you need to own up bitcoin and pay on-chain transaction fees.
In the event that one party were to attempt to “cheat” by publishing an older commitment tx, their peer is able to use the previously exchanged revocation secret to claim the funds of the malicious actor,providing a valuable incentive to remain honest,securing the network overall
These commitment tx are asymmetrical, as they spend the balance of the peer initiating the force close to an arbitration contract, while the funds of the other party are sent to their wallet immediately. This allows the peer that is not initiating the force closure to contest it.