Abstract: A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to support a mechanism to offload IPSec/IKE processing of virtual machines (VMs) running on a host to an embedded networking device, which serves as a hardware accelerator for the VMs that need to have secured communication with a remote device/server over a network. By utilizing a plurality of its software and hardware features, the embedded networking device is configured to perform all offloaded IPSec operations on data packets transferred between the host and the remote device over the network as required for the secured communication before the data packets can be transmitted over the network. The embedded networking device, in effect, acts as a proxy on behalf of the VMs running on the host to perform the offloaded IPSec operations as well as serving as the network interface for the secured communication between the VMs and the remote device.