An N session distributed architecture provides a software solution to the major computational challenges faced with providing secure communication. A registration entity is identified as the session arbitrator through which N devices on a network dynamically participate in establishing, maintaining and destroying cryptographic sessions. Session keys are generated by one or more devices registered with the registration server. Multiparty key agreement and device (or another form of) authentication is used to pass session keys and security policies to all parties involved in the encrypted session. Network discovery techniques are used to discover parties that will participate in the secure communications. All sessions appear to be local to the arbitration server, however individual sessions are maintained by several devices operating as a collective. Encrypted stream partitioning and computational resource allocation to decrypt the individual partitions in such way as to ensure system stability with increasing session demands is introduced in the architecture. This provides a cryptographic system architecture with encryption/decryption processing power limited only by the number of participants in the collective and network bandwidth or latency.