An embodiment of the present invention includes a technique to provide anti-replay protection with QoS queues. A single global anti-replay window is maintained to have global lowest and highest sequence numbers for an Internet protocol security (IPSec) security association (SA). The single global anti-replay window is associated with individual differentiated services code point (DSCP) or DSCP group, the individual DSCP or DSCP group corresponding to individual per-DSCP anti-replay windows. A received packet having a sequence number is pre-processed before packet processing using the single global anti-replay window. The received packet is post-processed after packet processing using the individual per-DSCP anti-replay windows.