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 2 (data link layer), MACsec is the transport security protocol of choice. The BA451 is a very scalable engine implementing the MACsec standard for high throughput applications.