Master Password Backup

ignoramous:

It is fine the way password managers vend them out, with sufficient entropy.

I think the issue is just that you can’t really measure entropy of a non-random password. Cryptographic entropy is a property of the mechanism by which the password was generated, not the password itself. That’s why a passphrase of x characters has less entropy than a password with x characters. If someone creates a password that’s just their name any entropy estimate will be inaccurate. You need a secure random method of generation for any entropy estimates to be accurate.

ignoramous:

Password managers better have “escrow” mechanisms and not be reliant on a single knowledge factor…

Yeah, but that makes them use a combination of factors, they don’t purely use a possession factor either. Maybe I misunderstood your point though and you were saying that they involve a possession factor rather than just a knowledge factor? Which yeah I agree with in the case of offline password managers to some extent, although in all cases I think they are designed so that the security model doesn’t rely at all on the possession factor of the vault itself.