title: What is the best way to encrypt hardcoded strings in C++?
body: <p><strong>Warning: C++ noob</strong></p>
  
  <p>I've read multiple posts on StackOverflow about string encryption. By the way, they don't answer my doubts.
  I <em>must</em> insert one or two hardcoded strings in my code but I would like to make it <strong>difficult</strong> to read in plain text when debugging/reverse engineering. That's not all: my strings are URLs, so a simple packet analyzer (Wireshark) can read it.
  I've said difficult because I know that, when the code runs, the string is somewhere (in RAM?) decrypted as plain text and somebody can read it. So, assuming that is not possible to completely secure my string, what is the best way of encrypting/decrypting it in C++?
  I was thinking of something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>//I've omitted all the #include and main stuff of course...
  string encryptedUrl = "Ajdu67gGHhbh34590Hb6vfu6gu" //Encrypted url with some known algorithm
  URLDownloadToFile(NULL, encryptedUrl.decrypt(), C:\temp.txt, 0, NULL);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What about packet analyzing? I'm sure there's no way to hide the URL but maybe I'm missing something? Thank you and sorry for my worst english!</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit 1: What my application does?</strong></p>
  
  <p>It's a simple login script. My application downloads a text file from an URL. This file contains an encrypted string that is read using fstream library. The string is then decrypted and used to login on another site. It is very weak, because there's no database, no salt, no hashing. My achievement is to ensure that neither the url nor the login string are "easy" to read from a static analisys of the binary, and possibly as hard as possible with a dynamic analysis (debugging, revers engineering, etc).</p>