Keeping Intruders at Bay

Abstract

Chapter 9 showed you the principles of user authentication and sessions to password protect parts of your website, but the login scripts all relied on usernames and passwords stored in text files. Keeping user details in a database is both more secure and more efficient. Instead of just storing a list of usernames and passwords, a database can store other details, such as first name, family name, email address, and so on. MySQL also gives you the option of using either one- or two-way encryption. In the first section of this chapter, we’ll examine the difference between the two.