Gary kiernan wrote:
I can't answer the questions you're asking about Strava data so I'll have to take your word on it that it can be easily changed. But I have a question for you. With your knowledge of how to do it how easy would it be for you to spot it being done? And how easy would it be to do twice a day for ultra distance runs?
Thanks for joining Gary. I'm currently working on my own GPS spoofing tools and will try to have another spoof this coming weekend. With a proper spoof for a run it would be indistinguishable from the real thing with GPS, cadence, and heart rate. The hardest part is just creating the rough GPS route to follow, which can be done by any number of means such as recording GPS in a car, using someone else's GPS file, creating a saved route on MapMyRun by clicking on a map, etc... Cadence, heart rate, and pace can be made to follow the gradient of the hills and all variables can have some random noise injected.
Spoofing running is much easier than spoofing cycling because in cycling to have to follow the cyclist physics model based on power, which does not exist for running.
It would be easy to spoof any number of runs once the tools are set up and the rough routes generated by any number of means. The spoofing would then involve interpolating the GPS coordinates between the ones recorded in the route and filling in the calculated time, heart rate, and cadence. A GPX or TCX file essentially contains human readable text in XML that consists of the longitude, latitude, elevation, cadence, heart rate, and GMT time so it is trivial to write one out. In fact, I will just be using a preexisting GPX library to handle the file input and output for dealing with the GPX syntax so I don't even have to give it too much thought.
And there are already existing websites out there that offer to spoof GPS for you if you pay them......