What best practices should PHP developers follow to maintain session security and prevent unauthorized access to protected pages?

To maintain session security and prevent unauthorized access to protected pages, PHP developers should use secure session handling techniques such as regenerating session IDs, setting appropriate session cookie parameters, and validating user permissions on each protected page request.

// Start session
session_start();

// Regenerate session ID
session_regenerate_id();

// Set secure session cookie parameters
ini_set('session.cookie_secure', 1);
ini_set('session.cookie_httponly', 1);

// Validate user permissions
if (!isset($_SESSION['user_logged_in']) || $_SESSION['user_logged_in'] !== true) {
    header("Location: login.php");
    exit();
}