VIRTUALIZED SHARED SECURITY ENGINE AND CREATION OF A PROTECTED ZONE

Methods and apparatus are provided for creating a secure zone having multiple servers connected to a resource virtualization switch through I/O bus interfaces, such as PCI Express or PCI-AS. Servers connected to the resource virtualization switch using I/O bus interfaces share access to one or more virtualized cryptographic accelerators associated with the resource virtualization switch. Applications on a server or system images running on hypervisor inside server can use cryptographic accelerators associated with the resource virtualization switch as though the resources were included in the server itself. Connections between multiple servers and the resource virtualization switch are secure non-broadcast connections. Data provided to a resource virtualization switch can be cryptographically processed using one or more shared and virtualized cryptographic accelerators.