I'm in the middle of creating an application that gets news headlines from an FTP server.

Hard coding the password in the source code doesn't allow for change and it's not secure at all, storing it in the registry is not a bad idea, but what's the best way to encrypt the password ? It has to be reversible and not require any 3rd party components.

also, how 'safe/secure' is it to do you own password 'encryption/scrambling' then store that (knowing that users might hex edit your .exe to look around)