This paper advances the understanding of how the size of a machine learning
model affects its vulnerability to poisoning, despite state-of-the-art
defenses. Given isotropic random honest feature vectors and the geometric
median (or clipped mean) as the robust gradient aggregator rule, we essentially
prove that, perhaps surprisingly, linear and logistic regressions with $D \geq
169 H^2/P^2$ parameters are subject to arbitrary model manipulation by
poisoners, where $H$ and $P$ are the numbers of honestly labeled and poisoned
data points used for training. Our experiments go on exposing a fundamental
tradeoff between augmenting model expressivity and increasing the poisoners'
attack surface, on both synthetic data, and on MNIST & FashionMNIST data for
linear classifiers with random features. We also discuss potential implications
for source-based learning and neural nets.