For security reasons it’s fairly good practice to invalidate all log-in sessions when a users password is changed. This is especially useful when a users account has been compromised and they go to change or reset their password. Without log-in session invalidation the attacker will still be logged in and able to cause chaos.
Technology
Setting a secure remember me cookie in Laravel
As of Laravel 5.0 it’s still not possible to set the remember me cookie with a secure flag. This is slightly weird as there is a configuration option for secure session cookies. Fortunately modifying Laravel to set a secure log-in cookie is not too difficult – all we need to do is provide a custom Guard class for the Auth driver which overrides the setRecaller() method.
Understanding the Nginx Configuration Inheritance Model
The nginx configuration model is a big improvement over the Apache HTTPd one. But when you dive in deeper there are some quirks to be aware of. Without knowledge of…
Securing Nginx + PHP When Using Path Info
Remember register globals? Remember how you had to code as if it was off, because it might be? Remember how you had to consider the security implications of it being…
The Fun that is UTF-8 Support in PHP
Lately I’ve been working with a friend on a daily-deal aggregator. The Groupon-like sites are popping up everywhere and the market for aggregators is still fairly unfilled. My project, Alladeals, target the Swedish daily deals market and as such it needs to support Swedish characters. In future it might have to support other languages as well so I decided that UTF8 was the way to go. Since most webpages are encoded in UTF-8 these days it has been fairly painless to actually work with UTF-8 in PHP, that is, until yesterday.
Optimizing Nginx for High Traffic Loads
While we cannot optimize the load time of individual connections we can ensure that nginx has the ideal environment optimized for handling high traffic situations. By high traffic I mean several hundreds of requests per second, the far majority of people don’t need to mess around with this, but if you do, are curious or simply want to be prepared then read on.