Patent ID: 8191086

Claim:
A method for retrieving and manipulating attribute information of a target process executed by a virtual machine, the method comprising: determining, with a first component executing within the virtual machine, whether an interface window has been opened by the target process; hooking, if the window is determined to have been opened, into a first application program that is executing the virtual machine with an application programming interface (API) to retrieve the attribute information from the target process; determining, with the API, a communication address based on an operating system identifier that is common to the target process and the first component and the API; communicating the attribute information from the API to the determined communication address of the first component, wherein the attribute information uniquely identifies the target process; parsing, with the first component, the received attribute information to obtain a window identifier of the target process; determining, with the first component, which of a plurality of windows has a window identifier corresponding to that of the target process; generating, with the first component, a component tree for the window determined to have a window identifier matching that of the target process using the received attribute information; and providing a single-sign-on application, executing outside the virtual machine, communication access with the target process using the generated component tree.