Managing SwCA Binary

How to Install SwCA Binary

When the SwCA application is activated for a Cloud Agent, it downloads the following SwCA binaries from the Qualys CDN server. Once the binaries are successfully downloaded, Cloud Agent installs them automatically without any manual intervention.

• For Linux assets—. qualys-swca-datacollector package. You can view the SwCA application installed as the qualys-swca-datacollector package in the software package manager of the operating system.
• For Windows assets— SwCAScanner.exe file. During the SwCA scanning process, the SwCAScanner.exe appears among the running processes of the operating system.

For list of Qualys CDN URLs, see the Prerequisites section.

How to Upgrade SwCA Binary

Cloud Agent continuously monitors the availability of latest SwCA binary versions. When the new SwCA binaries are available, Cloud Agent downloads qualys-swca-datacollector package for Linux assets and  SwCAScanner.exe file for the Windows assets. The SwCA binary upgrade is handled automatically without any manual intervention.

How to Uninstall SwCA Binary

When the SwCA application is deactivated for the Cloud Agent, the qualys-swca-datacollector package is uninstalled from the Linux asset, and the SwCAScanner.exe file is removed from the Windows assets.

How Does SwCA Binary Work

When SwCA is activated, Cloud Agent downloads the latest SwCA binary. The SwCA binary facilitates scanning open source packages and commercial software component and share the scan data with Qualys platform for further processing.

 The SwCA scanner for Windows creates temporary files in the system's temporary directory (C:\Windows\Temp) during processing. SwCA decompress these files for validation in the temporary directory. Once the SwCA processing is complete, SwCA cleans all these temporary files permanently.