In current networking technologies, source authentication, data integrity and confidentiality are becoming more and more important. There exist numerous software implementations for security protocol suites on nearly all OSI layers, but these implementations are not well suited for timing-critical, high throughput applications. On OSI layer 3 (network layer), IPsec is the transport security protocol of choice. The BA454 is a very scalable engine implementing the IPsec standard for high throughput applications.