Why Passwork built a three-tier recovery system instead of an admin master key

Password manager Passwork has detailed how it designed account recovery without a single 'god mode' credential that could decrypt all stored data at once. The company argues that any backdoor capable of unlocking everything instantly becomes a critical single point of failure, turning one compromised account into a total breach. Instead, Passwork uses a zero-knowledge architecture where the server only stores encrypted data and never holds decryption keys, meaning recovery must be planned before an incident occurs. To handle lost access, the system splits recovery into three isolated tiers, each limited to a narrow task, so no single layer can expose the entire vault. The first tier addresses owner login issues via server-level CLI commands that are disabled by default and require explicit activation, keeping them out of reach of web-only attackers.