On the machine example there is a (tcp/ip) program listening on port 12345. The protocol it talks is some plaintext language. I want to talk with it, but i do not want others to know what i am sending to it. I am lucky enough to have remote access to that machine via ssh. I setup a tunnel with the following command

ssh -N -L 12345:example:12345 timvw@example

Now my program can connect to localhost:12345 and ssh will make sure that it ends up at example.:12345 without others being able to see the actual data. For windows users i suggest that you take a look at Plink.