On the Resonant Core blog there's a new post from Scott Arciszewski looking at some strategies for secure long-term authentication (usually in the form of "Remember Me" functionality).

Let's say you have a web application with a user authentication system, wherein users must provide a username (or email address) and password to access certain resources. Let's also say that it's properly designed (it uses password_hash() and password_verify() and rate-limiting; it doesn't have any SQli or XSS flaws). Everything is going well for a while, but eventually your users would like the convenience of a "Remember me on this computer" button. What do you do?

He proposes a few different solutions including:

• the storage of credentials from the database in a cookie (a bad idea),
• generating a unique token when the uses requests the "remember me" to store in a cookie
• using two pieces of information, a random token and an "authenticator" for validation

He points out why the first two solutions aren't the best approaches and then gets into the details of how to handle the last recommendation. He includes both the SQL and the PHP code to make the token creation and verification work, performing an auto-login when the two values provided match up.