I suspect it's a student project, maybe done for a class at UCSC. The two authors worked together on another project [1], as students at UCSC, in the Spring 2013 semester.
You suspected correctly. Christopher and I wrote this for a computer security class at UCSC (taught by Ethan Miller, who I expect will at some point read this), and I posted it to reddit to see what people thought. The paper was a bit rushed, and isn't proofread at all, if I had known it would pop up on HN, I would have polished it a bit more.
[1] http://news.ucsc.edu/2013/06/entrepreneurship-showcase.html