I was viewing my google analytics account other day and I saw many searches of login with remember me script. Download Code/Files as Zip. The random password and tokens will be stored in the database with the expiration date and time. bindQueryParams binds the argument value to the query. Once the time expires, then the expiration flag will be set to 0 and the keys will be deactivated. Any user presenting that cookie would be authenticated, up to the expiry date. Kudos to the Master :). The obvious limitation here is that, if your IP address (or other information) changes, your cookie is useless. Within that, you have a method named bindQueryParams. It is included at the beginning of the application pages for which the user needs to be authenticated. If there is a fear like that, then we have to forget about the functionality “remember me”. He will be able to access the user’s account simply right? @adamse, nice, I usually refer to LinkedIn. Yes, go ahead and use the code in your projects. It is working in my environment and many of the users are using it. The nonce should be stored in the database, together with expiry date, and both checked when the cookie comes back. This then makes it possible to track where each is used from, and invalidate them individually. When the user checks the Remember Me option, then the logged in status is serialized in the PHP session or cookies like storages. This will ensure a "Remember me" checkbox added below the password field on one and every log in form. A "remember me" cookie consists of the user ID, a token (big random number) and a sequence token (another big random number). 9 random bytes is sufficient for this use case, so there's no need to balloon it up to 64 hex characters. Shared browsers would mean that the unauthorised access is possible. On clicking the logout link, the remembered login state will be unset from the PHP session and cookies. And you would really want to either mark the cookie as secure, and use a secondary cookie for the duration of an individual session, or protect the entire session (not just the login process) with SSL to prevent the cookie from being stolen off the wire and used by an unauthorized party. What is the intention to store it in the cookie? You need to debug and get to the error. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. Thanks. That is, sometimes they would need to put their password in again anyway, but seldom, and only for sensitive operations. When the user logs in to the application they have a check-box which allows them to stay logged in (ideally with a range of time periods for the user to select). Thank you very much and again, congratulations !! But, a possible way to make it secure is not to … PHP is a server-side scripting language designed primarily for web development. Code Description: Create a simple PHP Form with username (text field), password (password field), remember (checkbox) & Login (submit) button. OWASP PHP Security Cheat Sheet - Basic PHP security tips for developers and administrators. @D.W. Encrypting DOES allow a site operator to verify that it has not been tampered with. I know it is something in the Auth.php file that need to be done, but I am not sure what to change. If found, the sequence token is regenerated, stored in the database and sent to the user. If the token is still valid, the user is treated as authenticated, if not then the token is cleared and the user is redirected to the login screen. Second, for users that were remembered, you should (probably, depending on sensitivity) invoke a reauthentication process for certain sensitive operations. client ip, computername, timestamp, similar stuff), and send that in the cookie. Easy to setup and integrate into you project and along with striking features of remember me,session tracking,email validation,secure against vulnerabilities: SQL injection, XSS, CSRF etc and the most convenient One Click Social Login. Hello, thank you so much for your kind explanation. Amazon even better :). The cookie-based logged in state validation is done by testing cookie availability and expiration stored in the database. I ask because I cannot tease out exactly what the bindQueryParams is doing, but it seems to serve the same purpose as the core PHP function that it invokes (bind_param). In both cases, the attacker can attempt to brute force a random AES key. My answer is incomplete and has a nontrivial flaw, in some situations - please see @Scott's answer, https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/109439#109439. How to Securely Implement a "Remember Me" Feature? Most significantly: it mitigates the impact of timing information leaks on the string comparison operation used in the database lookup. Based on this boolean value, the user will be allowed to proceed with the application or redirected back to the login page. PHP login with remember me function. This means that when the session ends they will be logged out and have to provide their login details again next time they wish to access the application. Encrypt the user id by calling encryptCookie () function. Set Remember me COOKIE if 'rememberme' is POST. I This is why the post suggests that the identifier should be random (otherwise, it wouldn't be needed, as the username could be used instead; the hashing itself doesn't add any security). A common approach would be to use a strong encryption algorithm to store a cookie containing the following information on the user's computer: AES([Expiry date] + [random salt] + [Username] + [Password]). This tutorial will give you an idea of how you can implement an auto-login feature in PHP. I don't think it would help much. While writing user login data in the session or cookie we need to be aware of the security breaches which might compromise the application’s authentication system. Once the match found then the expiration date is validated with the current date and time. In a login script, remember me feature is used to preserve the login details entered by the user. If the keys are not empty then they will be hashed compared with the database. Will adding a device fingerprint on top of this increase security (e.g.. When the user accessing the application pages, the existing logged in session is checked to redirect the user to access the requested page. Secure "Remember Me" This library implements the best practices for implementing a secure "Remember Me" functionality on web sites. If you implemented a naive random token authentication, an attacker could send a lot of requests until they find a valid authentication token for a user. Another problem: How much information does your database query leak about your application? It minimizes the user effort by preventing to enter login details for each time. The accepted answer isn't wrong, but I'd argue that it's a bit more complicated in one respect than it needs to be, and neglects an area where a little bit more complexity is needed. On subsequent visits the cookie will be presented to the application, and the server will need to check whether it is still valid (ie the expiry period for the remember me function hasn't been hit). Use this for signup creation and combine these two codes. In case the user decides to click … SMS or E-Mail. client ip, computername, timestamp, similar stuff), and send that in the cookie. The downside is then that the site has to protect an AES key. Login Script with ‘Remember Me’ feature will allow the user to preserve their logged in status. Usually I wrote some planned tutorial for php beginners and I was thinking to write a tutorial on cookies but may be another time Login with remember me script is based on cookie. @Jesper There is an insignificant difference between storing an AES encrypted version of the password, and a hashed version of the password. How to make secure login with PHP and MySQL database avoiding SQL injection, check data integrity and other malicious attacks, Live demo and free source code available Upon entering a page usually needing a login, if the user has a remember me cookie available and its token can be used to authenticate the user, then the user is automatically logged in. Plain passwords should not be stored in the user’s cookie, this will allow hacking the application. If both the session and the cookies are not having any data about the remembered login, then the user will be redirected back to the login page. Remember me function in php. The system can then warn the user and/or delete all stored tokens from this user from the database. See Amazon for an example of the second part! I have noticed that you reuse the same basic DBController classes on many of your projects. Viewed 170 times 2. Once the code passes through with all the validation, the user will be redirected to the dashboard. Only the hash of the nonce should be stored in the database. This screenshot shows the UI for the secured Remember Me with a login form. Any ideas what might be wrong? At least a suitably long AES key should keep them busy for a while. Let's use PHP as the target language but the concepts should be applicable to any language. You can also provide a link from the web. Hi Vincy – I have a quick question that I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind clarifying for me. (max 2 MiB). Thanks @scott - it took me a while to grok the importance of the timing attack here, but now I see you are correct! If you would like to provide "remember me" functionality in your application, you may pass true as the second argument to the attempt method, which will keep the user authenticated indefinitely (or until they manually logout). In this video, I will explain to you how to add the Remember Me option in PHP Login Script. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/62#62, https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/63#63, https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/26484#26484, That sample implementation doesn't use a CSPRNG. Uses password_hash() for hashing passwords ... Chet has said that including sensitive credentials in a PHP file is not secure. When the user checks the Remember Me option, then the logged in status is serialized in the PHP session or cookies like storages. It’s free to use. As it is a security loophole to store the plain password in the cookie, the random numbers are generated as the authentication keys. Definitely not. Your email address will not be published. See Secure Remember Me for Login using PHP Session and Cookies for creating a login with Remember Me. That's an interesting question. Initialize $_SESSION ['userid'] with $userid and redirect to home.php. Hi, I’m Vincy. I have this small questions. User Registration in PHP with Login: Form with MySQL and Code Download, Double Opt-In Subscription Form with Secure Hash using PHP, How to Implement OTP SMS Mobile Verification in PHP with TextLocal, Live Username Availability Check using PHP and jQuery AJAX, Show PHP Captcha on Failed Login Attempts, How to Add WordPress Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) using Google Authenticator Plugin, Secure Remember Me for Login using PHP Session and Cookies. Thank you so much! (Yes, I'm talking about side-channels.). One common suggestion for mitigating this is trying to tie the cookie to a source IP address (encrypted or stored on the server of course) which is checked when the user presents the cookie, however this causes problems with large corporate environments where a user may come from a number of IP addresses, and also may be susceptible to spoofing. I have created a sample implementation for PHP. When the user attempts to log in with the application, the entered login credentials are verified with the database. If the logged-in state exists with the session or cookie array, then this code will set $loggedIn flag to true. You can find the details in the DataSource.php available in the download. This the HTML code to display the login form with ‘Remember Me’ option. Assuming you already have a website that implements all of the standard login stuff, what is the correct and most secure way to allow users to automatically be logged in for a certain time period (let's say 30 days)? Also anyone that can get access to the cookie (either through a vulnerability in the site, a browser issue or through malware planted on the machine) will be able to get unauthorised access to the site. 1942-2021. An attacker can invalidate the remember-me cookie of any user by simply submitting a remember-me cookie like this: username,md5(username),invalid_token. Space is at a premium. I am using MariaDB with php version 7.2. Wow!! Can you kindly explain why you need to use. “She replied promptly. -1 You are proposing to transfer the end users password over the wire and store it on his harddisk? The database table that contains the user id and tokens also contains the expiration date of the tokens. This form contains a checkbox captioned as ‘Remember Me’ to allow the user to preserve his logged in status. However, HTTP cookies are limited to 4 KiB per domain. One question: why did you create a ‘password’ and a ‘selector’ in the cookie? Thank you for your time, great examples, and excellent work. Encrypting does not allow a site operator to verify that it has not been tampered with. Login information and unique secure tokens are stored in a cookie. Creating a Secure PHP Login Script. Many sites have this option and I use it a lot when I have the chance because there are sites that I visit daily and it would be frustrating for me to type my username and password every time I have to log in. There are many examples out there and many with obvious security flaws. It could also also contain the user agent and IP address so an attacker has to replicate these as well. User login with remember me or login with remember password is a feature of web applications to allow user to save login details to login form to populate same login details when try to login from same page. If you can explain the business case, I can suggest you better alternatives. By clicking “Accept all cookies”, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. Thank you Kcscoelho. Infinit Global Solutions, P.O. Your email address will not be published. This strategy is implemented in Gatekeeper. In fact, for this to be secure, I'd say that's probably what you're going to have to do anyway, because you would want to set the expiration date as a part of the cookie value and encrypt it rather than rely on the plain-text expiration property of the cookie itself. There are a few steps we need to take before we create our secure registration system, we need to set up our web server environment and So, yes, but there is no security reduction here. Submit Search. Gone too soon xx . Codecourse videos - Demos and advice on the most common PHP security areas. The database querying is performed efficiently with the MySQLi prepared statement. Then, the cookies are set to keep the login name and the password for a specified expiration period.  Instead of storing the users’ plain password, random password and token are generated and stored in the cookie to avoid hacking. That would allow the user to invalidate the cookie (if it was compromised) by simply changing their password. Extract the tarball archive into your modules directory and enable the module via the modules page. What side-channels are mitigated? John Arthur Rest in Peace John. Contribute to acidjazz/summon development by creating an account on GitHub. How to use remember me function in php.php remember me function.Adding a remember me feature to your php login script ,PHP Login Code with Remember me Login Details We explore the security of login forms and a robust model for remember me checkboxes. Can I use your code in my project? When a user presents the cookie, the database is searched for these three pieces of information. I am thinking to get users mac address and create some hash and then store that hash as a cookie. This is a great answer. First, assuming your threat model does not worry about exposure of client side cookies, you can generate and store a nonce on the server side, hash that with the username and other info (e.g. 1931-2021. Is this good? You don't have to depend on the browser to delete the cookie, you have the site check the expiration date on the cookie. An alternative approach would simply be to add two fields to your user database, for a cookie value (long/strong/randomly generated value), and an associated expiry date. Using PHP, you can let your user directly interact with the script and easily to learned its syntax. Import this SQL script to test this example in your local environment. After set up, try login with admin/admin as the username and the password. If the user visits the site, the login information from the … The session state database will need to record the time that a token is set and the duration that it should be remembered so that it can compare the token presented. Advantages of this approach are that there is no encryption key to manage (or worry about rolling over), and that there is no possibility of the user's password being compromised. The idea of the “remember me” feature – and let’s face it, we’ve all seen this before – is that their authenticated state is persisted beyond the immediate scope of use. PHP Secure Remember Me for Login using PHP Session and Cookies with referer url. And it can be populated in the login form at the time of login. Administer => Site building => Modules from the menu. DVWA, Damn Vulnerable Web Application - Example of unsecure web application to test your skills and tools. secure minimal php "remember me" methodology. If the decryption results in garbage, it has been tampered with. In the dashboard screen, it contains the welcome text with the logout link. 2 \$\begingroup\$ I have followed a mysqli tutorial to create a login with cookies and session with remember me authentication in pdo. The authentication cookies are set with the expiration time of 1 month. Yes, it calls the “bind_param” function from the core PHP. This is a fundamental and basic confusion about the distinction between confidentiality vs authenticity/integrity. In this tutorial we will create a Simple Login Script With Remember me Feature. when you get that cookie without a session, reissue a new, regular session cookie. Wouldn’t just a password be enough? A PHP page authCookieSessionValidate.php contains the session and cookie-based logged-in state validation code. Box 2162, King Faisal Road, Umm Al Quwain, United Arab Emirates. Offcourse you also need to store things like expiration date and/or userId, etc. You're relying on the security of a random value for challenge-response authentication here. It’s not saving any data in the tbl_token_auth table for some reason. Set the $_COOKIE ['rememberme'] for 30 days. 12 characters in the base64 (or base64url) alphabet is fine. This will actually be used for authentication. quickly? Also agree on the other points for the most part, but I'm not sure that's the way I intended it anyway :-). If it returns false, then the code will search for the authentication keys stored in the cookies. A "remember me" cookie consists of the user ID, a token (big random number) and a sequence token (another big random number). The nonce should be stored in the database, together with expiry date, and both checked when the cookie comes back. This time period should be strictly enforced; ie, I don't think a valid solution would be giving a cookie an expiration date and hoping the user's browser deletes it in a timely manner. Thank you. Disadvantages are that you need additional storage for your users. This is to prevent attacks such as CSRF and shared desktop exposure. Secure. Served me like a glove! This is very user friendly feature that help to reduce user attempt to type login details again and again. What is the purpose of this method? Yes, I did it to increase the security. That’s a big help. If only the username and the token are found, it is presumed that someone else has stolen the cookie because the sequence token was already used. On successful login, the unique member id from the member database is stored in a session. It is mostly used by a newly coders for its user friendly environment. On the further plus side, this approach allows you to provide different "remember me" tokens on different devices (a la Google Account manager), simply by storing the tokens in a separate table and allowing more than one entry per user. Adding the additional step of then brute forcing the hashed password does not really add all that much, given how easy passwords are to brute force these days. If a match is found, the PHP session and the cookies are used to preserve user logged-in state before redirecting the user to the dashboard. Click here to upload your image generate and store a nonce on the server side, hash that with the username and other info (e.g. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy, 2021 Stack Exchange, Inc. user contributions under cc by-sa. Also note that like the session cookie, this should be delivered only over https, and using the secure and httpOnly attributes, and of course have the cookie scoped properly etc. Contact Me, “Not only did she get back to me right away, but she provided exactly what I was looking for, and I was able to essentially drop the php code directly into my solution ...” read more. Login Script with ‘Remember Me’ feature will allow the user to preserve their logged in status. She asked all the right questions and provided a very quick turnaround time, along with support to get any issues ironed out ...” read more, Do you want to build a modern, lightweight, responsive website help build websites and I’m available for freelance work. Encrypting it allows the site operator to verify that it has not been tampered with (extending the expiry date, for example), as well as protecting the clear text password from compromise. These keys are hashed and stored in the database with an expiration period of 1 month. Hi! Is it to increase security or does it have a more specific purpose even if I didn’t understand? Ask Question Asked 1 year, 2 months ago. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/64#64. Hi :) Everything except one thing is working nicely. Including the password means that an attacker who gains access to the AES key can still not "mint" tokens to authenticate as arbitrary users. These are the classes used to trigger and handle database operations. All tokens should only be stored as hashes because they basically work like passwords and would enable an attacker, who obtained to database, to login. PHP Manual - A must read security chapter in official documentation. Implementing Secure User Authentication in PHP Applications with Long-Term Persistence (Login with "Remember Me" Cookies) - Paragon Initiative Enterprises Blog One would just need to make sure on the server side that operations such as changing a password removes any "remember me" cookies stored in the database. If it results in valid data, it has not been tampered with. Is it safe to store the password hash in a cookie and use it for “remember-me” login? I have created a login form to get the username and password. So first you need to know what is cookie. :(, https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-securely-implement-a-remember-me-feature/502#502. I'll start off by saying that I'm not sure it can be done without some weakening of the security of the application, but then depending on the site that may be considered worth the trade-off. (They probably wouldn't be able to select which victim they're impersonating.). When a user presents the cookie, the database is searched for these three pieces of information. Congratulations on the explanation and the example, great quality, clarity and objectivity. Download the latest supported release for D5.x or D6.x now. Thanks! What if someone stole the cookies of the user? James Thornber ‘Eddie’ died after a battle with COVID, loved and very missed husband, dad, brother, grandad and great grandad. When the session token is set, that time period is used as the cookie expiry. Login forms with a remember me checkbox are a common requirement. In Memory of... 1941-2020. I meant to say that, because the nonce is a password equivalent, instead of the nonce, only the hash of the nonce should be stored in the database. Some might see this as a good thing, I see it as needlessly hostile towards usability for Tor users. Required fields are marked *. I’m agreeing with him. Stealing cookies are far fetched. If you can share me details with errors, exception, some sort of debug information, then we can zero down the issue. It’s not displaying in php errors(I have php errors on for testing at this stage).