Among other things, Java byte code was designed for compactness, platform independence, ... (Yes, the good old XOR (exclusive OR) is almost no encryption at all, but bear with me.

Nevertheless, the goal of programmatic MD5 encoding or using XOR algorithms is to make it harder for someone to gain access to secure Java resources, not to make it impossible. As IBM Knowledge Center ...

Using XOR to flip bits and to zero out registers was a commonly used idiom in IBM System 360 Assembly language and right through to System z. You usually learned this by reading others’ code.