Can I use an ssh tunnel to secure an otherwise insecure connection?

Question

Is there a way to set up an ssh tunnel, then connect an arbitrary program (say, an IRC client) to the port on localhost and get an effectively secure connection to a server? How would I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Yes. Anything tunneled via SSH will be encrypted. Note however that the protection is of course just only between the two points you build up your tunnel up. So to have a completely secure IRC connection with a SSH Tunnel you would have to build a tunnel to the IRC Server itself.