Securing company networks has been essential to implement security in an industrial envi- ronment. With the recent rise of modernizing and incorporating Industry 4.0 into factories and production lines, it became essential to extend IT security to factories as they become connected. This resulted in operations technology security and new standardization in this area calls for ac- tively securing industrial assets. However, in the highly specialised field of operations technology and embedded systems, not every device can run additional security measures, as they are old or designed with sparse resources. Securing communication between devices can be one of many se- curity concerns. Therefore, this thesis proposes the concept of a ”universal” encryption device that enables securing of communication links in a direct peer-to-peer industrial setting by using the AES-128 encryption standard. For this purpose, the thesis proposes a possible design of such an encryption device by proposing a modular system architecture with decoupled communication and cryptography. The proposed architecture is also implemented in a proof of concept for Ethernet communication and tested through simulation as well as being deployed to an FPGA. The impact of the encryption device is briefly investigated in a lab setup, after which conclusions about system stability and performance are made. In the lab test, the expected additional latency based on the simulation, was not observed. The current proof of concept is not stable enough to perform exhaus- tive testing on it, but it establishes a baseline for future work and extensions, before applying it in an industrial setting.