How to hide strings in a exe or a dll?

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Welcome to the wider world of defensive programming.

There are a couple of options, but I believe all of them depend on some form of obfuscation; which, although not perfect, is at least something.

  1. Instead of a straight string value you can store the text in some other binary form (hex?).

  2. You can encrypt the strings that are stored in your app, then decrypt them at run time.

  3. You can split them across various points in your code, and reconstitute later.

Or some combination thereof.

Bear in mind, that some attacks go further than looking at the actual binary. Sometimes they will investigate the memory address space of the program while it’s running. MS came up with something called a SecureString in .Net 2.0. The purpose being to keep the strings encrypted while the app is running.

A fourth idea is to not store the string in the app itself, but rather rely on a validation code to be submitted to a server you control. On the server you can verify if it’s a legit “cheat code” or not.

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