US Patent 10122689 Load balancing with handshake offload

Cryptographically protected communications sessions are established using a distributed process. A load balancer proxies handshake messages to a first computer system that negotiates a cryptographically protected communications session with the client. When the client and first computer system complete negotiation of the session, the first computer system provides a set of session keys to a second computer system, through the load balancer or another channel. The second computer system then uses the session keys to communicate with the client over the cryptographically protected communications session.