To my knowledge there is no Arduino compatible way to use the Secure boot feature currently which is fully supported (and the IDF Bootloader is generally reccomended for Secure Boot as well).  It also requires modification of partitions.csv as well as efuse bits (one way once burned), so it can easily brick a device).

It may be possible by using IDF to generate the encryption key, and then encrypt your Arduino compiled firmware, then upload both to the board.
(e.g. This guide shows using PIO Binaries and IDF, but its the same process in Arduino IDE/Visual Micro instead of PIO).

It can also theoretically be done without IDF, but you are highly liker to run into serious issues with the bootloader from Arduino (as it is not aware of the encryption features and cannot be recompiled in the Arduino IDE).

Generally it may be better to use ESP-IDF along with Arduino as a component (essentially the reverse of the Arduino Board Package which has IDF as a component), however most code can remain the same.

If we find a way to implement this in Visual Micro safely and reliably we will update this thread.