Securely protecting passwords in MySQL databases

[Zaspien]

I've recently been learning PHP for web development (and using MySQL for the database back end) and I've been doing a good job at it so far. Everything makes sense and it's been a seemingly easy transition from C#. However, there's one thing that confuses me slightly: the protection algorithms within the databases in MySQL.

When I'm developing websites, I'm going to be dealing with passwords so I need to keep them safe. Now, when I was working off line for practice where the password protection wasn't too big of a deal, I put up a MD5 hash (just so I could make sure my code worked with a hashing algorithm when verifying passwords) and things went very smoothly. However before putting a website online I decided to read further into things. Through some research, I've learned that MD5 apparently isn't the safest of method to protect a password so I'm holding up on developing online until I find a widely available algorithm for MySQL that is very secure.

tl;dr

So if any of you out there are PHP/MySQL developers, or just know a thing or two about the language, I would love some input and suggestions on where to look for the algorithms to protect a MySQL password field for a database.

 

[Zet]

Use PHP's built-in crypt() and don't forget to salt.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-encrypt/
https://us.php.net/crypt

 

[Zaspien]

Use PHP's built-in crypt() and don't forget to salt.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-encrypt/
https://us.php.net/crypt

Thanks for the heads up. The crypt function looks like what I might just need!