I assume you mean so that running "strings" on the binary will not lead you to anything, right? You can use an XOR with some weird value to hide the strings. Just make sure the value you use will, for example, set the high bit on the string bytes...
Its is a cheap, free way to hide strings. It is, by no means, secure.
When rtm used this technique in his worm I'm sure a lot of people, such as myself, spent the five minutes necessary to hack up a program that tries XORing the input with all 256 possible bytes. I had the program pipe the output of each try through strings and wc, to check whether any significant text was uncovered. Only 0x00 and the single now-forgotten value he used got hits - no second XOR value. Anyway the point is it's *really* by no means secure, and you can do much better with a few minutes thought. Set up a basic framework using a Makefile that takes a file of MNEMONIC "text string" and runs it through an encoding program to produce a .h file of static char* text[] = { ... #define MNEMONIC 17 "vb4hv7789sd", Then in your actual program you just call decode(text[MNEMONIC]); Given that simple framework you can experiment with lots of different encoding and decoding functions. --- Jef