Simplest way to get access to bcrypt in php 5.2.6?

Question

I want to up my password hashing security with bcrypt, but I'm stuck on php 5.2.6 (due to being on debian 5.0). What would the the least invasive way to do so?

Apparently the suhosin patch bundles some kind of bcrypt implementation but I don't know if there will be performance issues and I don't know how to squash the changes to sessions that come with suhosin.

Alternatively I could persue an upgrade from php 5.2.6 to php 5.3, which has builtin fallback support for bcrypt, but then I expect I'll have to deal with compatibility issues from upgrading.

Alternatively I would love to just be able to apt-get install server/external software support for bcrypt in debian if there is some way to do that.

What's the simplest approach?

Answer 1

Simplest approach is to just install a newer version of PHP. Dotdeb has one:

deb http://php53.dotdeb.org/ lenny all