I have created a registration/login system for my members area. Once the user has logged in I want to store a session variable that I can use to retrieve data associated to the user from the database.
Should I in encrypt the variable in any way? The data I want as a variable will either be the username or the id, which is best?
Should session ids be regenerated in anyway and when??
You should regenerate your session id after a successful login/logout. For security reasons, I would reccomend to ask the user for his password if he want’s to perform a critical action (changing important data, deleting account or submit an order for example).
As AurimasL stated, you don’t have to worry about session data on the server side. I reccomend this reading, if you are on a shared host, because then there are some security aspects: http://phpsec.org/projects/guide/5.html