Screen Sharing with VNC - password encryption?

Hello,

I am attempting to set up Screen Sharing between two iMacs. (Snow Leopard on the iMac I'll be sharing, Lion for the iMac I'll use to access the shared screen.)

Basically, my question is when I try to connect with VNC, is the password Encrypted? I've searched Google and these forums but no one seems to answer that question. (Maybe I'm asking it wrong.)

In this scenario:

GO > CONNECT TO SERVER> vnc://username:password@ip.add.ress.here

...does it send that initial connection attempt in plain text or is it encrypted? I've seen How-Tos showing how to encrypt the data between screens once the connection has been made, but that's not quite good enough. I'd like to assume that the initial connection is encrypted but with sensitive data at risk, I can't make that assumption.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. 🙂