What are some best practices for handling user authentication and password verification in PHP applications?

One best practice for handling user authentication and password verification in PHP applications is to securely hash passwords using a strong hashing algorithm like bcrypt. This helps protect user passwords in case of a data breach. Additionally, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection attacks when querying the database for user authentication. 

// Hashing a password using bcrypt
$password = 'secret_password';
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT);

// Verifying a password
$entered_password = 'secret_password';
if (password_verify($entered_password, $hashed_password)) {
    echo 'Password is correct';
} else {
    echo 'Password is incorrect';
}

Keywords

password hashing password_verify password_hash bcrypt authentication

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