Thread: Securing data?

Okay, so I'm fairly new to c++ programming. For practice, I wanted to create a program to store my data (like passwords and such) but I'm not sure how to go about making that data secure..

Obviously the program itself will prompt the user for a password at the start. If I store the data in a text file, then someone could easily just open it and read it. If I store the information in variables, how will I add new information while the program runs, rather than editing the source code?

I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and assume this is a very dumb question so thanks in advance for your patience

Well security is a pretty advanced topic, but there are some things you can do to get some light, simple security.

For instance, instead of storing a password in a file, store a hash of the password in the file. Then when the user enters in a password, your application will hash that password, then check to see if the hash matches the one stored in the file. This way a user cannot just open the file to read the password.

The problem with that is that a dedicated abuser could read your hash from the file, then generate a password that matches the same hash.