<p>I couldn't find any information on wherever a connection creation between cluster's pod and locahost is encrypted when running "kubectl port-forward" command.</p>

<p>It seems like it uses "<a href="https://linux.die.net/man/1/socat" rel="noreferrer">socat</a>" library which supports encryption, but I'm not sure if kubernetes actually uses it.</p>

<p>As far as I know when you port-forward the port of choice to your machine kubectl connects to one of the masters of your cluster so yes, normally communication is encrypted. How your master communicate to the pod though is dependent on how you set up internal comms.</p>
