21.7. Random Identifiers
If you ever need to track users through a site, you will need to assign unique identifiers. You can store all the information you know about the user in a database and pass the identifier from page to page either through links or with cookies. You will have to generate these identifiers randomly; otherwise, it is too easy for anyone to masquerade as a legitimate user. Fortunately, random identifiers are easy to generate.
Listing 21.9 illustrates how this works. A pool of characters to use in the session identifier is defined. Characters are picked randomly from the list to build a session identifier of the specified length. That identifier is used inside a link so that it is passed to the next page. This method works ...
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