Patent ID: 8738897

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, by a credentialing service, verification that a principal has been authenticated by a third-part authentication service; delivering, by the credentialing service, a self-loading and self-executing applet to the principal; receiving, by the credentialing service, a request for a communication credential from the applet; generating, by the credentialing service, the communication credential as a random number tuple representing a user name and password combination for the principal; and supplying, by the credentialing service, the communication credential to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client, initiated by the applet on the principal, and to a VPN server, the communication credential used by the VPN client to establish a VPN session between the VPN client and the VPN server instead of requiring the principal to separately log into the VPN server, and further used to re-authenticate the VPN session without requiring the principal to separately log into the VPN server, wherein the VPN client is a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) client and the VPN server is a SSL server that utilize two-tier authentication techniques.