Abstract: Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a control system architecture that is used to monitor and control various  processes running at different remote locations from a common control center.  As such, SCADA communication protocols are sensitive to the  delay between control action issuance and delivery at the control locations,  thus most implementations tend to leave out encryption. We introduce a layer of encryption in the network channel which does add to the  delay however it can significantly reduce the security vulnerabilities. To this end, we looked at and benchmarked some of the available cipher suites including a very recent NTRU based cipher suite. We propose one  solution to improve the security. We then implement ed our solution over the Modbus protocol and   measured the extra time delay caused by our solution. Finally, we discuss some future prospects of our solution and how it can be modified to achieve further reduced time delays.