How to programmatically set up a ssh tunnel on iPhone to access remote service?

I am developing an iPhone application which is communicating with a remote service over a tcp socket connection (the service actually listens on telnet and takes telnet commands too). The connection is of course insecure and all requests (with quite a bit of sensitive data, such as passwords) and responses are transmitted as plain text. My first reaction was to consider a web service with ssl, but developing a web service from scratch seems too lengthy.

Because of that I have been thinking of using an ssh tunnel in order to secure the traffic. Is it possible to set up an ssh tunnel in an iPhone application (with libssh2 for example) and then use that tunnel to securely connect to the remote service? If so, how should I set up the tunnel and most importantly, how should I connect to the remote service and give commands/receive responses? Lastly, what should I keep in mind regarding the tunnel?

EDI开发者_运维百科T: I forgot to mention that the server running the service is using Windows. SSH is achieved via Cygwin.

I am sorry if the question is too basic but this is really my first real brush with ssh.

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I think you may have more security issues by using an ssh tunnel because there isn't a secure way to tie down the authentication information in the app and well, if someone can get that login information they could conceivably connect to your ssh session and start trying to issue arbitrary commands. Of course there are ways to lock down an ssh session, but still, I'd be very wary of that. At least with a web service, it acts as a "broker" between the iPhone app and the telnet session so you can add an extra layer of protection.