Risky Business #311 -- Does NameCoin have legs?

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This week we chat with a local consultant, Mark Brand of Datacom TSS, about the general topic of authentication. We've seen some interesting cases of things going wrong with auth on consumer sources lately. The @n Twitter username hijacking, the Matt Honan disaster of 2012.

Now Google's run off and bought SlickLogin, a novel approach to mobile app auth. Will that get us anywhere? And what about NameCoin -- a BitCoin protocol-derived peer-to-peer authentication scheme? I'd never heard of it, but the concept is fascinating. Mark pops by to fill us in.

This week's show is brought to you by Senetas. In this week's sponsor interview we're chatting with Senetas CTO Julian Fay about some work they've been doing on their Ethernet products. As it turns out, variable frame sizes can give up too much info to an attacker, so they've worked on some neat new tech that basically forces their stuff to send fixed length frames and make sure everything stays random.

Adam Boileau pops by as usual to chat about the week's security news. Show notes, including links, are here.