Patent ID: 8713658

Claim:
A method of providing single sign-on (SSO) capability in an application publishing environment, the method comprising: receiving, by a gateway service, an access request from a client application; prompting, by the gateway service, the client application, for credentials; authenticating, by the gateway service, the client application using the credentials; responsive to a successful authentication, selecting an initial host computer from a cluster of host computers; encrypting, by the gateway service, the credentials using a public key associated with the selected host computer; transmitting, by the gateway service, the encrypted credentials to the host computer; decrypting, by the host computer, the encrypted credentials; authenticating, by the host computer, the client application using the decrypted credentials; and responsive to a successful authentication on said host computer: starting, by the host computer, a host session for the client application, and automatically erasing the credentials from memory of the gateway service subsequent to the successful authentication on the host computer, wherein subsequent requests for access to another host computer in the cluster are forwarded from the gateway server to the host computer for authentication based on the credentials.