The present invention is directed towards systems and methods for distributed operation of a plurality of cryptographic cards in a multi-core system. In various embodiments, a plurality of cryptographic cards providing encryption/decryption resources are assigned to a plurality of packet processing engines in operation on a multi-core processing system. One or more cryptographic cards can be configured with a plurality of hardware or software queues. The plurality of queues can be assigned to plural packet processing engines so that the plural packet processing engines share cryptographic services of a cryptographic card having multiple queues. In some embodiments, all cryptographic cards are configured with multiple queues which are assigned to the plurality of packet processing engines configured for encryption operation.