Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Safeguarding the PHP session


The PHP session mechanism is quite simple. Once the session is started using session_start() or the php.ini session.autostart setting, the PHP engine generates a unique token that is, by default, conveyed to the user by way of a cookie. On subsequent requests, while the session is still considered active, the user's browser (or equivalent) presents the session identifier, again usually by way of a cookie, for inspection. The PHP engine then uses this identifier to locate the appropriate file on the server, populating $_SESSION with the stored information. There are tremendous security concerns when the session identifier is the sole means of identifying a returning website visitor. In this recipe, we will present several techniques that will help you to safeguard your sessions, which, in turn, will vastly improve the overall security of the website.

How to do it...

  1. First of all, it's important to recognize how using the session as the sole means of authentication...