Timing attacks are not a widely recognized problem, since they require significant skill and resources of the attacker. To prevent these attacks constant-time string comparisons can be used. These implementations are rather hard to get right, without leaking timing information.

While high profile applications and frameworks already ship with time-constant string comparison functions, this RFC aims to make it simpler for PHP developers to protect their applications. Additionally there's less chance of unexpected timing differences in lower level languages.

The password_verify function implemented in PHP 5.5 already does a time-constant string comparison, however in many projects bcrypt can not be used for some reason (legacy project, interfacing with other systems, etc.), but they'd still benefit from this functionality.