Authentication and Sessions

Authentication is the process of identifying the participants in a communication. Authentication lets you

control access to resources, e.g. hide information for non-privileged users or dissalow users to upload/change information
personalize resources, e.g. only show relevant information
log user behaviour

You may find out automatically which computer access your service, but if you want to identify the person, you will have to ask her.

In this lecture we will show how to perform HTTP user authentication and custom PHP/MySQL authentication with sessions.