My favourite chat client is irssi, anyone who likes command line and shells will love irssi, it is aso a great tool for IRC operators not only users.
Some IRC networks offer you a secure SSL chat but you will need to specify the port for this, the most common ports in IRC  for secure (SSL) [...]

If you need to choose a password there is a Unix program called mkpasswd that will help you choose a strong one.

Some examples:

mkpasswd –char=10
This will generate a 10 char random password.
You can also try:
mkpasswd -s “insertwordhere”
This will take the characters from the entered word, and create a password from those characters.
For more information [...]