Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications, 3rd Edition

Protecting Against Development Tools

Desktop systems will usually have a large number of packages installed, as shown earlier. Some of these may be development tools, which allow the user to custom build or create software.

Having development tools installed on server operating systems used to be a very significant concern. There was a time when a lot of different operating systems and CPU architectures were in the systems that were connected to the Internet. Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and IBM all had variations of Unix, and these Unix variants ran on different processors. Even in the space where an Intel processor was used, a variety of operating systems were installed, like Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and, of course, ...