I am using a csv file to authenticate user login. Is it possible to password protect the CSV file? I do not want anybody to be able to download the csv file through url. I googled and I found out that it is not possible to password protect a csv file. Is there any other way I can password protect the file?
the short answer is no: CSV is a plain text format, it's not Excel.
the long answer is: you should never put security relevant information into a folder which is accessible via the webserver. move the file into a folder you can access from PHP but which is outside of your document root in Apache