Editing Password (section)

===Limits on the number of password guesses===
An alternative to limiting the rate at which an attacker can make guesses on a password is to limit the total number of guesses that can be made. The password can be disabled, requiring a reset, after a small number of consecutive bad guesses (say 5); and the user may be required to change the password after a larger cumulative number of bad guesses (say 30), to prevent an attacker from making an arbitrarily large number of bad guesses by interspersing them between good guesses made by the legitimate password owner.<ref>{{cite patent |country=US |number=8046827 |status=patent}}</ref> Attackers may conversely use knowledge of this mitigation to implement a [[denial-of-service attack|denial of service attack]] against the user by intentionally locking the user out of their own device; this denial of service may open other avenues for the attacker to manipulate the situation to their advantage via [[Social engineering (security)|social engineering]].