What are some best practices for handling form submissions and user authentication in PHP scripts to ensure data integrity and security?

Issue: To ensure data integrity and security when handling form submissions and user authentication in PHP scripts, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input, use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks, and implement secure password hashing techniques. PHP Code Snippet:

// Sanitize and validate user input
$username = filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$password = filter_var($_POST['password'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username AND password = :password");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':password', $password);
$stmt->execute();

// Implement secure password hashing techniques
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);

// Verify password
if(password_verify($password, $hashed_password)) {
    // User authentication successful
} else {
    // User authentication failed
}