VPN (Virtual Private Network) is one of the link (VPN link hereafter) between two points in the Intermost important technologies on the Internet. With VPN, net. However, today's VPN technologies mainly focus on we can securely access to resources in the organizational making secure connection between inside and outside of network via the Internet. In VPNs having hierarchical a organization, along with introducing a firewall to filter structure, since each VPN domain has different access pol-out malicious access into the organization. Therefore, icy (whether VPN gateway should perform authentication, * \ ] * * r l~~~~~n this paper we assume that a domain with an access data encryption, and so on or not), an administrator of a p P VPN domain may need to configure access policies which policy (a VPN domain hereafter) has a firewall at the are different from every VPN sub-domain. However, in the border of the organization (hereafter a VGW, standing for existing VPN methods, since access policies are stored in VPN gateway). An access policy defines how to control a static configuration file of each VPN gateway, an admin-network access into the organization based on many istrator of a VPN domain has to cooperate with the other kinds of information, including whether authentication administrators of its sub-domains. Therefore, management and encryption are necessary or not, what encryption cost of access policies becomes considerably large if the algorithms are allowed, which hosts are allowed to organization has large and complicated structure. In this paper, we propose an efficient management a method of access policies for hierarchical VPNs. In order In large scale organizations, there may be many dito reduce management cost, we introduce a database with visions each of which has a different access policy. hierarchical structure to represent access policies easily In such organizations, VPN domains are configured and policy servers to get access policies automatically. hierarchically, just like DNS domains. In this paper, weThe effectiveness of our proposed method is confirmed by discuss VPNs to access into an lower VPN domain from an experiment on an actual network using policy servers the outside of the organization through two or more based on the proposed method.VGWs, and refer to this type of VPNs as hierarchical VPNs. I. INTRODUCTION In order to access into the lowermost VPN domain VPN (Virtual Private Network) receives much atten-from a client at the outside of the organization using a tion as a technology for secure access by users to their hierarchical VPN, the client has to traverse all VGWs organizational network via the Internet. There are many from the uppermost one toward the lowermost one, VPN technologies proposed so far, and they are roughly hop by hop. There exist some VPN link configuraclassified into two categories, namely ones that establish tion methods proposed so far that can traverse more a VPN link between two hosts, and ones between a host than one VGWs, such as proxy cascading method o...