What are the potential security risks of using Active Desktop elements in PHP applications, especially in the context of user authentication?

Using Active Desktop elements in PHP applications can introduce security risks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious scripts can be injected into the page and executed in the context of the user's session. To mitigate this risk, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input before displaying it on the page.

<?php
// Sanitize and validate user input before displaying it
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input);
echo $clean_input;
?>