Obviously a website can be hacked, but is there anything that prevents the hacker from changing the redistribution target inflation addresses of all accounts to one address?
What is stopping me from taking all the rewards from a community pool just before they are released, by changing all those redistribution addresses who voted the community pool to one single address?
Is there anything that the voting mechanism has in place to prevent such things or is it up to the web developers?
In short, yes. The inflation pool wallet can be hacked just like any other crypto wallet can be hacked. You would need the private key. Thus, the security implications are the same and it is up to the owner for the community pool wallet (the inflation pool that all voters voted on) to take precautions just as if it was their own personal wallet.
First: all the Stellar inflation rewards is directly handled by stellar core, so it’s regulated by the SCP (the same mechanism that validate every transaction)
Second: the inflation reward is sent to the voted inflation address (aka “inflation pool”), any not to all addresses that voted for it
Said this:
What an inflation pool usually does, is to redistribute the amount received to all who voted for them, but as you said, this is up to the pool developers.
They can decide to not redistribute anymore or they can decide to apply a fee (a known pool reserve for himself the 10% of the amount as “maintenance cost”
What happen if a pool will not redistribute the amount completely *? As happened less than a week ago, users just voted for another inflation address that “claims” to redistribute the full amount, and the original pool lost his votes and simply it will not receive rewards from SCP,
*This can happen to various reason like hacks, policy change, or whatever the inflation holder thinks
About “trusting a wallet”, any wallet can be hacked (even so called hardware wallet). There is always a low possibility (close to 0) that I luckily guess a secret key of an existing wallet.
All of the concerns you have are the same for any wallet this is not just confined to an inflation pool.
Making the website separate from the wallet helps keep the two separate and reduces the chances of being hacked.
Your concern shouldn't be with everyones wallets being changed because that would require me to have the secret keys to every wallet to change the inflation destination. The single point of failure is the wallet that receives all of the votes making it the target to get the secret key.
If you are specifically asking about the process of inflation I believe that the anchors that confirm the transactions and how they are trusted may be a way to change the addresses. If this was the case we would have a befowled node running on the Stellar network and have far bigger problems then inflation destinations.
