Php sessions secure log in

Question

My question is about creating a secure log in routine. After comparing the user name and password to the stored values I set a session variable called logged to true. Then as the user surfs around the web page I just check the logged variable for true or false to determine if the user should have access.

This is my first time creating something like this. Is this secure? I feel like there is something else that I should be doing to make sure that users are valid.

Answer 1

Anyone that gets your session cookie, is able to login as you. If you bind a session to an ip address, it's a lot harder. But this can give you problems with people that have changing ip addresses. It's up to you to decide if that's worth the trouble.

Answer 2

If you're not handling any kind of sensitive information and just trying to provide a personal user experience, what you're doing is fine. However, if you're truly concerned about security, there are several other approaches you can take. The first is to create a database table called "user_tokens" or something similar. When a user signs in, create a random key and store their ip address in the table associated with the key. Also, store that key in a cookie on the clients' machine. Anytime they try to do something sensitive, you can compare their ip address and key of the cookie to that of the database.

Research a little bit into Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) and session hijacking. The method I've outlined above will really cut down on this.