Java - Are there any ways to obfuscate/hide strings to prevent against decompilation?

Question

I just have a handful of Strings that I would like to obfuscate/hide against decompilation. I'm aware that I'll never be able to achieve true prevention but I am hoping there are any/some ways that will at least prevent the actual Strings from showing up exactly as they are.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can put them in a resource file and encrypt it using AES (for example). Then on the application initialization extract the data.

Answer 2

There are a number of free and commercial "java code obfuscators" that change names of non-public API and do simple transformations of string literals. This obfuscation won't stop a determined attacker, but it will discourage casual observation.

Answer 3

My favorite method is to declare them encoded in base64. Then its just a simple library call to decode the string out of them an use whenever needed. This obfuscates the string and its length both