Abstract: With increasing requirements of network applications, software data encryption/decryption for VPN gateway becomes bottleneck of the processing speeds. In this paper, a novel architecture for embedded VPN Gateway based on network processor, coupled with Cryptography card is proposed. The main idea is that the significant and computing intensive portion of the computation, such as encryption/decryption and hash calculation of IPSec data , are implemented by the hardware Cryptography card, while the network processor is dedicated to encapsulating IPSec data. The experimental results show that the architecture can work steadily and have a good performance in high speed.