Are there any potential security risks to consider when using LDAP authentication in PHP?

One potential security risk to consider when using LDAP authentication in PHP is the possibility of LDAP injection attacks. To prevent this, it is crucial to properly sanitize and validate user input before passing it to LDAP queries. This can be achieved by using LDAP escape functions to encode special characters in user input.

$username = ldap_escape($_POST['username']);
$password = ldap_escape($_POST['password']);