How to properly use piped streams

Here's the skinny:
Say I have a socket client & server running, and I want to add a layer of encryption. I modify the client to encrypt the output, but I don't want to modify the server. So what I'm doing is making a pass-through sort of server that does the decryption for me, then passes the decrypted stuff to the server. This is really a question more about streams than sockets. So what I'm doing in the pass-through is receiving a socket connection from the client, and opening a socket on the server, then decrypting the stream as it passes through. I got some piped stream examples off the internet, but I am failing to get them to work. Anybody here have experience using piped streams, and want to give me a few pointers?