Embodiments disclosed herein provide a “lazy” approach in caching a hierarchical navigation tree with one or more associated permission trees. In one embodiment, only a portion of a cached permission tree is updated. One embodiment of a method may comprise determining whether a dirty node exists by comparing tree timestamps of the permission tree and the master tree. If the tree timestamp of the master tree is temporally more recent than the tree timestamp of the permission tree, the permission tree has a dirty node and the method may operate to check node timestamps of the master and permission trees. This process may be repeated until the dirty node is found, at which time a portion of the permission tree associated with the dirty node may be reconstructed, rather than the entire permission tree itself, thereby eliminating or significantly reducing access time to the cached permission tree.