Best way to store encryption keys in .NET C#

Question

In our application we have a lot of sensitive configuration settings, which we are storing in a xml file which is again encrypted.

This secure file has to be decrypt

Answer 1

If you can't read them in reflector, how do you expect the program to read them? You could obfuscate them by breaking them up and storing the parts all over the place, but (AFAIK) once you require your program to be able to read them, then anyone with access to your code can read them too.

Don't forget values in memory can be accessed as well (cough SecureString).