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. The packet processing engines can be configured to operate in user space of a system, and can access cryptographic resources via memory allocations mapped from kernel space to user space. A method for use with the multi-card/multi-core system can comprise detecting, by a kernel of the multi-core system, a plurality of cryptographic cards available to the system, identifying, by a configurator of the multi-core system, a plurality of packet processing engines configured to operate in user space on a plurality of cores of the multi-core system, and determining, by a card distribution manager, a distribution layout that identifies an assignment of the plurality of cryptographic cards to the plurality of packet processing engines.