Auto Login Feature Implementation with PHP

How to securely store login credentials and auto login where applicable!

Firstly, its very bad idea to save the username and password in cookie.

A simple alternate method of storing the credientials would be:
1) Create a new text field in the authentication table which will store MD5 hash. Call it session_key or something similar.

2) When you want to store the login credentials, on submit of the login page, the script should do the following.

• Validate the username and password
• If it is a good username and password pair, check for the saveLogin variable
• If the saveLogin variable is set, generate an md5 and store that in the database. Also store that md5 in a cookie. Be sure the database table has a cookie-expires field as well.
• Build the session data that you need.
• Redirect to Dashboard

3) On your Dashboard page, you should do the following:

• Check to see if the session still exists. If so, then render the page.
• If the session does not exist, check for the cookie.
• If the cookie exists, look up that session id in the database and be sure it hasn't expired. then build the session and render the page.

This should make your app a bit more secure. It may not be the best way of coding, but the concepts should give you an idea of how to make a fairly secure login page.