help hiding text

In just about all of my C++ programs, if you open up the program in notepad, you can see almost every string used in plaintext.
This is a problem because i am trying to make a secure password system.
Any output that i have shows up in notepad.
Any strings that i have shows up in notepad
Any strings used in a if statement or while loop shows up.

Is there anyway that i can stop this from happening? The only way i can think of is to put each character that i dont want to show up in an array, but thats causing problems when i try to use that in a conditional statement

the onyl way you will make this secure is if
you dont actually show a password in your program

what you can do, is do something to the user password
and if it equals something then let them in

yes but as i said before, when i do that. i.e. have the program ask for a password. If you open the program up, you can see what the input is being compared to in the if statement
i.e.

Code:

---

if (input == "thisisthepassword")
{
cout<<"you got the password";
}

---

if that is in the program, if you open it up in notepad, you can see the word "thisisthepassword" in plain text

he means like change it..

like replace letter and change letters with symbols so it doesn't look like it was..

So you essentially want to encrypt it?

Have your program test a password to an encrypted password using some sort of encryption algorithm.

good idea!
i already have a bunch of encryption programs that i made so it shouldnt be too hard

You don't want encryption; you want hashing.

you don't want hashing - in alot of cases there are multiple things that can hash to the same value.

like ILoveVectors and JostR said, I would save the encrypted vesion of the password somewhere, and when a user enters their password, encrypt it and test it against the saved (encrypted) password.

I would avoid saving the password in your program though, because then you have no easy way of changing it...

Quote:

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you don't want hashing - in alot of cases there are multiple things that can hash to the same value.

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Unless you're using a good cryptographic hash algorithm. But yeah, if you are going to go that far, you might use encryption instead.

Still, what is your "secure password system" supposed to do? Just because you use strong cryptosystems doesnt mean your security is good.

well, I was assuming this was only meant to be secured from people with direct access to his computer (family?). in that case, a simple XOR encryption should be good enough to keep them out (unless they know what they're doing)

Hmmm

Im completly new to programming, so I could be wrong.
But, couldnt you save the password in a binary file, then read the binary file, save the data red into another value, and check if the password the user red is equal to the files' value?

You could then make another program that saves the password into the BIN file, but requires the current password to run.

Go here to learn about C++ file I/O

Hope it helps!