Establishing secure channels between a pair of hosts is an attractive way when they want to exchange important data directly. Especially in an IPv6 environment, end-to-end secure communication is required because IPv6 hosts can get global IP addresses easily.

IPsec provides various security services for the traffic at the IP layer so it seems to be best suited for this purpose. However, IPsec is difficult to use because there are many parameters to set up for secure channels, and the configuration for IPsec is complicated. This paper proposes an automatic configuration method for setting up the end-to-end secure channels between hosts to use IPsec easily. We also describe the detail design of our proposed method.