What potential security risks are present in the provided PHP code for a browser game, and how can they be mitigated?

One potential security risk in the provided PHP code is SQL injection vulnerability due to directly concatenating user input into SQL queries. This can be mitigated by using prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user input before executing SQL queries. 

// Original code with SQL injection vulnerability
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND password='$password'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Mitigated code using prepared statements
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=? AND password=?";
$stmt = mysqli_prepare($connection, $query);
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, "ss", $username, $password);
mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt);
$result = mysqli_stmt_get_result($stmt);

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation password hashing secure session management

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