New on the ITNewb.com site today is this new tutorial looking at generating session ID numbers and random passwords for your application using functions like mt_rand and mt_srand.

Whether it's session ids, passwords or tokens in general, in the world of web development the ability to generate random alpha-numeric strings is a necessity. In this article I present a few simple yet effective PHP functions that can be used to generate strong alpha, numeric and/or special character tokens and passwords.

He gives examples of generating tokens and generating passwords, each with a custom function which he explains and gives a usage example for.