As some of the others pointed out, there's a lot to be considered when securing a website login form. Some other things to consider are:

• If the login is wrong, don't let on whether it was the username or password that was wrong.
• If you print out the username (e.g. you print 'there is no user Bob registered here') make sure you html encode the username first to prevent cross-site scripting attacks.
• The choice of session id hashing algorithm is important. MD5, the default in many cases is not really suitable for applications which require a good level of security.
• Make sure any database lookups you do carry out are protected against SQL injections.

And there's plenty more. You can get a bit of an introduction to website security at my site WebsiteSecurityBook.com. (it's all free). I'm gathering up information on all the different security issues to be considered when securing websites.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.