Chapter20.User Authentication

Chapter 20. User Authentication

In the previous chapter, we looked at using cookies and sessions as a way to associate information with visitors and manage their progress and interaction with our web application. In this chapter, we will take this one step further and look at how we can log users in to sensitive areas of our application and verify their credentials against the information we store in our databases for them.

In this chapter, we will

• Look at how to structure your web application to manage user logins

• Leverage existing schemes to restrict user access to the private sections of your web application

• Implement our own login system in PHP that works with sessions and the database to manage users