I've been developing a shopping cart for my friends company and have just
started using sessions to authenticate people. After reading many tutorials on
the internet about sessions and PHP I coded a login page. I keep hearing about
session id's but all the tutorials I read didn't mention them.
When a user logs on, the username and password are sent via SSL and the md5
hash is then checked against a hash stored in database. If the credentials are
found in the database, the users id is return and stored in a session. If the
credentials are not found this session value is 0. Every page that a user needs
to be authenticated to see checks to see that the user id stored in the session
is greater than 0, if not the user is classed as not authorised as 0 is not a
valid user id.
Is this method secure or can it be easily bypassed?
Another thing I was wondering is where are sessions values actually stored?
I've read that they're stored in cookies but I always thought there was a
seperate function in php to create cookies?
Sorry this is so long, any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks
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