Many, if not all, of you have had to deal with creating a secure site login at some point in time. Although there are numerous articles written on the subject it is painstakingly difficult to find useful information from a single source. For this reason I will be discussing various techniques I have used or come across in the past for increasing session security to hinder both session hijacking and brute force password cracking using Rainbow tables or online tools such as GData. I use the word hinder due to the fact no foolproof methods exist for preventing session hijacking or brute force cracking, merely increasing degrees of difficulty. Choose a method wisely based on your site’s current or anticipated traffic, security concerns, and intended site usage. The following examples have been coded using PHP and MySQL. I more than willingly accept comments, suggestions, critiques, and code samples from readers like you as they benefit the community on the whole. more »

There are perhaps hundreds if not thousands of articles on obtaining your visitor’s IP address. The majority if these entries will refer to a small subset of global $_SERVER variables (HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_CLIENT_IP, and REMOTE_ADDR). Although both fast and simple solutions utilizing nested ternary operations exist, they are generally prone to a fairly large bug. The HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR server directive may contain a comma delimited list of IP addresses based upon several proxy hops prior to the client request packet reaching it’s destination.

After scouring the web I came across two sites demonstrating what appears to be the most accurate IP retrieval method I have come across. I found a number of inefficiencies in the two functions so I’m going to provide you with my optimized version. more »