| I think justAuser is correct. It looks to me that the initial prompt to enter a pw is encrypted and the program loops thru the encrypted string and XORs each byte against 0x54. I think the same for the PW but I did not check that. If the success and fail strings were not in the clear I would have struggled to locate area of the code to look at. | ==> | 
 
                    
                    
                        | I would not say there is a hidden PW. More like there are many possible passwords that would work if they meet certain criteria. | ==> | 
 
                    
                    
                        | Wasn't able to run this because of a missing libgcc_s_seh-1.dll | ==> | 
 
                    
                    
                        | I "solved it" but am ways from fully understanding it. | ==> |