Imagine a multitenant web app that stores data in a Apache Cassandra cluster, with fairly many nodes.
Now assume that:
- Mallory launches a DoS attack against one tenant. (Perhaps that tenant is a company that people don't like, for some reason.)
- It's a layer 7 DoS attack. I mean, it's not a SYN flood attack or something like that, but a "hand crafted" attack that actually reaches the database layer of the web app.
- [Data stored on the Cassandra nodes] is sorted by tenant id. That is, data belonging to the tenant-under-attack is located on fairly few nodes, in comparison to the total number of nodes in the Cassandra cluster.
With these assumptions, other tenants should be largely unaffected by the DoS attack? Assuming that their data resides on [nodes that host no data belonging to the tenant under attack], and neglecting how the attack affects the application/web-server-layer and network I/O.
And, in a manner, Cassandra is more resilient against DoS attacks?
(In comparison to e.g. a RDBMS or MongoDB or CouchDB.)