To meet the consistently increasing compuiaiion demand while reducing the energy footprint, future computing architectures need to consider parallelism. In this paradigm, compute nodes with massive number of cores are directly interconnected in one board by short-range optical connections. At the same time, high-speed wireless connections of up to 100 Gbps are used on demand between compute nodes of different boards. That hybrid design not only enables flexibility and energy efficiency but also opens up new research questions to obtain secure and energy-efficient interconnects in various areas, such as communications, routing, distributed storage and especially security. This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art research findings in those areas, presents a novel key distribution scheme and expands current evaluation platforms with a novel testbed design and realization, leveraging the maturity of virtualization technologies.