The latest articles on DEV Community by LulLaS (@rolanfreeman6png). https://dev.to/rolanfreeman6png https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4018557%2F88d64be5-89e4-41a4-ad56-0af90066a98a.png https://dev.to/rolanfreeman6png en LulLaS Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:06:48 +0000 https://dev.to/rolanfreeman6png/how-to-hide-strings-in-c-binaries-with-consteval-1bkh https://dev.to/rolanfreeman6png/how-to-hide-strings-in-c-binaries-with-consteval-1bkh <h1> How to hide strings in C++ binaries with consteval — and why it beats xorstr </h1> <h2> The problem </h2> <p>Every C++ binary has strings. <code>strings.exe</code> reads them. Competitors see your API keys. Reverse engineers find your logic. Anti-cheat detects your function names.</p> <h2> The old way — xorstr (constexpr XOR) </h2> <div class="highlight js-code-highlight"> <pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> cpp auto key = xorstr_("my_api_key"); Problem: constexpr depends on the optimizer. MSVC doesn't fold it — plaintext leaks to .rodata. Also: dangling pointer in xorstr_() macro (returns char* from temporary). StealthLib — consteval (compiler-independent) auto key = S("my_api_key"); consteval forces compile-time evaluation on every compiler. Plaintext is consumed during translation — never emitted. Verified by binary_scan_test on MSVC + GCC + Clang. Differential testing Same strings, same compiler, same platform: StealthLib: 7/7 PASS xorstr: 3/7 FAIL (dangling pointer) What else is inside Hash-based API resolution (no API names in binary) 4-channel anti-debug (PEB + NtQuery + rdtsc + DR registers) IAT/EAT integrity checks VM detection (CPUID + DMI + disk) FIPS-180-4 SHA-256 Per-build key rotation (16 variants) RAII auto re-encrypt guards Quality 6 SAST tools clean: PVS-Studio (0 findings), SonarCloud (A ratings), CodeQL, Coverity (0.17 density), Semgrep, Codacy. 4.5 billion fuzz executions, 0 crashes. 40 mutation tests, 100% killed. 94.6% coverage. GitHub https://github.com/rolanfreeman6-png/stealthlib </code></pre> </div> cpp security programming showdev