Access control plays an important role in the area of information security, which guarantees that any access to data is authorized. Hierarchical access control is a special access control model in distributed environment, in which each user protects his local data using a secret key; moreover, for any two related users ui and uj, ui can access uj's data if, and only if, ui's priority is higher than uj. Therefore, there should be a way for ui to obtain the secret key of uj if ui's priority is higher than uj. This paper presents an efficient solution to the problem. A special kind of function called secure filter is used as the building block of the proposed solution. In the solution, an authorized user can acquire correct keys efficiently and securely via secure filters. The proposed solution is also well-performed while inserting/deleting users, injecting/removing relations, and changing secret keys. Especially, only deleting users and removing relations will change some keys in the system, other operations can be performed freely without affecting other keys in the system; only secure filters need to be modified in these cases.