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What is the best way to generate a 'fingerprint' of user unique-ness in PHP?
For example:
Ideally, the fingerprint so label the 'machine' rather than browser or 'ip' but I can't think of how this is achievable.
Open to ideas/suggestions of how you uniquely identify your users, and what advantages/disadvantages your method has.
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Unfortunately, PHP is exclusively a server-side programming language, so you can't implement browser fingerprinting in PHP alone. But, by implementing Fingerprint on your frontend, you can easily add fingerprinting to prevent the same user from registering in your application with multiple email addresses.
Browser fingerprinting happens when websites use special scripts to collect enough information about you — such as your browser, timezone, default language, and more — that they can uniquely identify you out of the sea of other internet users.
Easiest and best way: use phps session-management - every client is given an ID, stored in a cookie (if enabled) or given as a get-variable on every link and form (alternatively you could set a cookie on your own). But, this only "fingerprints" the browser - if the user changes his browser, deletes his cookies or whatever, you can't identify it anymore.
Identifying every client by IP address is usually a bad idea and won't work. Clients that use the same router will have the same IP addresses - clients connected through a proxy-pool could have another IP address with every page load.
If you need a solution that can't be manipulated by the client in an easy way, try to do a combination of the following, using all that are supported by the clients browser and compare them on each page-load:
There's a solution called evercookie that implements all of this.
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