Feature Proposal: Toggle to disable any/all insecure features in the build scripts

[adamfarley]

Summary

An argument or flag that causes the build scripts to deliberately disable functionality considered to potentially risk build security.

Why do we have insecure features?

Reasons include:

• User convenience
• Code resilience
• Insecurity is presumed to be mitigated by code-external factors.

Purpose of this Issue

• 1) To establish the mechanism for triggering the inhibition of said functionality.
• 2) To unify file downloads (in the build process) through a single part of the code base.
• 3) To make 1 inhibit 2.
• 4) To raise a separate issue to discuss further ways we could expand the range of build script behaviours inhibited by 1.

[adamfarley]

My progress can be tracked in the commit messages here: #4076