Dear Monks,
I am creating a website that will require the user to use a login and password.

I've looked at websites that explain how to make a site secure and many of them recommend not putting the username of the user as a cookie.

I would never save the password in a cookie and I would never pass the username or password as a hidden variable (that's just dumb) .... my question is this:

The sites that suggest not putting the username or userid as a cookie -- how else am I supposed to figure out whether a user is logged in or not? Is there any other way?

Right now I have it so that when a person logs in (or if they create a new account) I place a cookie saying that 'this userid is logged in'. Every time they click on a link (ie. go to their account manager, post an event, etc.) I immeidately check the cookie to see who it is and if there is not userid cookie then I print the login page and tell them to login.

Anything insecure about this? If so, please let me know and tell me how to make a site 100% secure with regards to logging in and passwords (currently the passwords are stored in a DB and encrypted).

Also, people have recommended storing the sessionid in the DB along with the user id so I can figure out who the user is .... Correct me if I'm wrong but that means anytime they view another page they my programs will have to query the DB -- isn't that inefficient? Thanks!

In reply to How to make a secure website by cranberry13

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.