Making a line of code difficult to read

Question

Im writing a way of checking if a customers serial number matches my hard coded number. Is there a way of making this as hard to read as possible in case an undesirable gets their hands on the code?

I am working in java.

For instance (pseudo code)

if (x != y) jump out of code and return error

Cheers , apologies if this is a bit of an odd one

Answer 1

Security through obscurity is always a bad idea. You don't need to avoid it, but you should not trust solely on it.

Either encrypt your serials with a key you type in at startup of the service, or just specify the serials as hex or base64, not ASCII.