Hiding Text in .EXE?

[jawed]

I'm writing a program that includes sensitive information (for example a password for that program) in the executable. If I do something like
char *szString = "secret string"; then I can easily find and edit that string using a Hex Editor. How can I reliably encrypt or somehow hide this string from showing up in the executable? I want to re-assemble the real string during runtime.

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Jawed Karim

Do you want the good news or the bad???

It is easy to hide strings by just XORing each character with a known character or rotation of characters. The bad news is that anybody with a debugger will be able to get your string values at runtime with no problem.

What are you trying to do, store passwords? If so try storing the results of a unidirectional hash of the password. These one way functions can not be used to reproduce the original password and can be stored safely.