What are the potential pitfalls of using sessions to store user data in PHP?

One potential pitfall of using sessions to store user data in PHP is that sessions can be vulnerable to session hijacking or session fixation attacks if not properly secured. To mitigate this risk, it is important to use secure session handling techniques such as regenerating session IDs after a user logs in, setting session cookie parameters to secure and HTTP only, and validating session data before using it. 

// Start secure session
session_start();

// Regenerate session ID
session_regenerate_id(true);

// Set session cookie parameters
session_set_cookie_params([
    'lifetime' => 0,
    'path' => '/',
    'domain' => 'example.com',
    'secure' => true,
    'httponly' => true
]);

// Validate session data before using it
if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) {
    // Proceed with using user data
} else {
    // Redirect to login page
    header("Location: login.php");
    exit();
}

Keywords

session user data security data loss expiration

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