Crashing/Taking a plane via the Matrix, My players posed the question Options

[LurkerOutThere]

I am puzzled why people think the federal government is somehow the big bad scary super tracking super competent super threatening power house when the setting has gone out of it's way to prove they are not. Yes the feds are highly competent but if you have a team that regularly penetrates double and triple A megacorporate sites of a more then middling secure nature the feds arn't that scary.

For the record I went with a dog brain autopilot on the plane, no onboard security rigger on this mission for privacy reasons. The team's plan is to take the plane in mid air while it is nominally in NAN airspace. Their approach will hopefully be supported by the Hacker blinding the planes sensor systems and air spirit support using concealment. They've hired a smuggler team with a radar bane equipped aircraft to get them to the target, they did some snooping around and got placed in contact with a hacker who has specialized in hacking the Corporate Court FAA and paid him a healthy sum of money for a passcode that will make a hack of the FAA systems even possible. Their intent is to use the FAA system to drop down into he plane itself and ensure it flies straight and level while the boarding team approached and adhears the "air sled" they've built to the vehicle and then gecko tip it up and level with the door. One there their plan is to drill their way into the planes air supply and inject a nerve toxin into the plane to debilitate those inside. Once they have cleared the plane of hostiles they have a missile designed to duplicate the planes transponder and matrix ID. It won't stay up for long but is their hope that it will give them enough time to get out of the proverbial search grid. Tonight's session was pretty much completely setup and making sure the players lined up as much as they possibly could in preperation, even beyond that I have additional suprises in store, and that's assuming everything goes right.

Also, i've worked in both a military enviroment and air traffic control, ATC security is laughable except for the air gap factor, in Shadowrun airgap isn't present or isn't possible so security would be excellent, but not the automagic failure people seem to feel it would be.

[Manunancy]

This sounds like an horribly complicated way to get rid of a strike team. I suppose they're planning to get away with the plane and sell it to recoup the expense ?

If so, that's where I would hit them with trouble. If teh plane is an uncommon enough model, selling it is going to leave a neat trail to poke into.

[LurkerOutThere]

Great Dunkel's ghost doesn't anyone around here go for rule of cool anymore?

They've got a contact who is going to fence the plane, their smart enough not to go out of their element and try something like that plus they fully appreciate how hot it will be. Their reasoning behind their actions is pretty straight forward. They know where the team is comign in and on what plane, after that point they'll basically be on the defensive again which gets in the way of their other pursuits and making money as shadworunners. Likewise hitting the plane at the airport is a less then desirable solution as while they may have the element fo suprise their enemies will have a marked terrain advantage. On the other hand if they grab the plane in mid air and keep it quiet for a week before their carefully edited exploits show up ont he local pirate trid it makes their enemies rep take a hit while helping their own, in the process they might also turn a tidy profit.

[cndblank]

Sounds cool to me.

Looks like a good plan and your players are in to which is great.

Also sounds like they have to physically get in to the plane before they can really start to hack it which is more than fair.

I'll say this, if any of their opponents survive, they will likely never feel completely safe ever again.

What a way to make your rep.

And don't forget all the gear, foci, and cyberware they will be removing from the opposition.

[ravensoracle]

As a back up plan tell them to get engine parts that match the plane. If they can't get to the plane for some reason just have the Air spirit dump a load of spare parts into the intake. As long as the investigation isn't too thorough it should be written off as an accident. Or for a more hilarious approach, have the team purchase a lot of dead geese with the feathers still attached. I could see the trid broadcast as the team is leaning out of the chase plane recording a Air Spirit chucking geese into an engine.

[Karoline]

My oh my, everyone is thinking far too complex.

First off reaching the plane via the matrix will be no problem. The plane will have a connection to something on the ground somewhere, and with the way the matrix works that means a hacker can get access to it.

Second, the easiest way to make it crash without raising suspicions is to change its altimeter to read 100m or so higher than it really is. When it comes in to land it will still be nose down when it reaches ground level instead of being nose up. Alternately, turn the plane off. Yes, you read right, just order it to shut down. Being shut down no remote connection will be able to get to it to turn it back on, and the odds of the passengers knowing how to turn the plane back on (while they are plummeting towards earth) or even being able to get to the 'on' switch are very slim.

Or heck, just have an air spirit fly up and chuck some explosives into the engines. Fact of the matter is that planes are scary easy to take down if they aren't designed for combat and/or expecting combat.

[Jaid]

My oh my, everyone is thinking far too complex.

i would like to point out that my suggestion was to just shoot the bloody thing with a kinetic missile costing a mere 1500 credits, forcing a crash test. i don't consider that to be particularly complex (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[LurkerOutThere]

For the record, I did ask for matrix solutions, secondly the reason you have to look for complex solutions is the simple ones are likely planned for.

[Karoline]

For the record, I did ask for matrix solutions, secondly the reason you have to look for complex solutions is the simple ones are likely planned for.

See, I think the fact that the first thing everyone suggest is complex speaks to how the mind works. People regularly miss the simple or easy problems/solutions. I've written several programs where initially something simple like entering 0 as a value would crash the program (divide by zero errors and such). I would put in safe guards for people trying to enter words instead of numbers, or for all kinds of other more complex problems, but I would forget the simple things like what happens if someone closes the program when I don't want them to (Occasionally that would be 'erase an important file').

So yeah, sometimes simple is the best. And yes, I admit that there is likely something in the program that stops the plane shutting down while it is in flight, but that is what a hacker is all about, making things do what they weren't designed to do.

Remember, you can set up the string to break when they walk into the room which causes the bowling ball to roll down the ramp and knock over the pin which hits the post which falls into the 'on' switch which turns on the fan which turns the pinwheel which has twine tied to it so that the pin holding the hammer is pulled out so the hammer hits the person on the back of the head..... or you can hit the person on the back of the head with a hammer. Sometimes simpler is better.

[Earlydawn]

Non-drone aircraft having hackable avionics systems fail the common-sense test, so you've got a couple options.

First, there are the basic interception options like a missile shootdown or spirit interference. If your playing style is pink mohawk, you can probably get a couple of AA missiles without difficulty. If you're playing a black mirrorshades game, acquiring any kind of anti-aircraft equipment bigger then man-portable is going to be a run in an of itself. Again, you can involve the hacker with this by requiring him to retrieve the aircraft's flight plan off of the air defense / air traffic network.

Your second option is infrastructural. Assuming that these guys are contractors flying a civilian plane, (in other words, not locked and loaded before landing), they're probably flying like everybody else. That means a flight plan, and all the intricacies of a scheduled landing. Players could sneak onto airport grounds and mess with any kind of microwave system they use for landing assistance, although that seems unlikely, considering that most life-critical navigation systems like that tend to scream real loud when they're not working right.

Alternatively, the players could hack into a full-sized drone and attempt to intercept the flight physically. Again, if you're playing pink mohawk style, this shouldn't be a big deal. If you're playing a campaign grounded closer to reality, this should be a monumental achievement involving both hacking any physical access to the air infrastructure (a run).

[Semerkhet]

Non-drone aircraft having hackable avionics systems fail the common-sense test, so you've got a couple options.

This.

It's hard sometimes for us to envision the paranoia that would be induced in a world with "weak" encryption. There is no way the flight control systems of a passenger jet would be remotely hackable. It just wouldn't happen. It would require physical presence of the hijackers, which is what your team is doing. The plan your team comes up with seems elaborate but, as you said, they're going for cool factor, not efficiency. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[LurkerOutThere]

See, I think the fact that the first thing everyone suggest is complex speaks to how the mind works. People regularly miss the simple or easy problems/solutions. I've written several programs where initially something simple like entering 0 as a value would crash the program (divide by zero errors and such). I would put in safe guards for people trying to enter words instead of numbers, or for all kinds of other more complex problems, but I would forget the simple things like what happens if someone closes the program when I don't want them to (Occasionally that would be 'erase an important file').

So yeah, sometimes simple is the best. And yes, I admit that there is likely something in the program that stops the plane shutting down while it is in flight, but that is what a hacker is all about, making things do what they weren't designed to do.

Please....just....stop. Okay, your analogy about programming code breaks down pretty spectacularly because it presumes no outside QA is being done on the system in question. What that means in layman's terms is we can assume for a plane someone has sat down and tried to break the system in every possible way they could think of, then handed it off to someone else to do the same then they've come up with every precaution based on that laundry list that wasn't A) too expensive to implement B) precluded by some necessary functionality. For the former The threshold is rather high as this is a 1 and change million dollar airframe designed to haul VIP's around in comfort and anonymity. For B there are certain conceits that are going in, both for in universe factors and just ease of play. Then we need to assume that even before the players came along someone has tried, either successfully or not to bring down a plane. In either case steps were likely taken as long as they didn't conflict with A or B above.

Here is what i'm going with for anyone curious:

The hardware:
The plane's control systems are only linked to the matrix in two places one is the Corporate Court FAA system and to the company that operates the planes system, both of these links are via VPN and are functionally unbreakable without a fireaxe solution on the plane in two places (primary and secondary). The plane has two pilot program on the node both of which would need to be crashed to make the plane pilotless. Even if one did that there is a hardwired autopilot system designed to keep the plane from just being flown into the ground, stalled, or flown into mountains. This is basically a souped up version of what we have today it means even if you breached the planes node and disabled the rigger/pilot it would take time and skill to overcome the dog brain safety measures and crash the plane time during which the distress beacon has gone up and help, both astral, matrix, and physical in the form of scrambled jets it going to be on the way. This system only has a one way connection to the matrix used to send diagnostic and distress information out. It also can take control of the planes counter measure system and will act to defend against missile attacks if it becomes apparent to it that the rigger/pilot program are not going to do so. None of the planes nuts and bolts avionics systems are accesable via the matrix itself. With an electronics kit (or a properly equiped drone) and some decent skill rolls you could tamper with these devices, however failure means an alert is raised additionally some of the planes sensors are scaning for just this sort of thing. It coulld also be tricked with signals intelligence or using a matrix hack to make the programs ignore the plane approaching (the dog brain isn't sophisticated enough to make that kind of determination is basically constantly asks three questions: Am i being shot at? Am I being flown stupid? Is someone attempting to tamper with my electrical systems?
The matrix:
The FAA network is heavily fortified but suffers from the sheer volume of users and nodes it must be connected to just to successfully do it's job meaning it is more vulnerable to social engineering (an approach my players have utilized, they've found someone through their contacts who already has an in on a system and procured a passcode which with at least keep them from being visible in the system logs right away. From there she'll have to hack through connecting nodes and find the regional one with her aircraft's link. In either case the system itself is military grade and will have some devious matrix architecture tricks (i'm still working these) like honeypots, dummy systems and the like to confuse intruders in addition to the usual "lots of ICE, lots of spiders, high rated programs"
The Charter companies systems are a lot smaller but because of the expense of bringing them up to FAA security spec have a lot more paydata on them, both from the immediate mission standpoint (it for example contains a detailed run down of the planes security proceedures, expected response times etc, as well as information on who chartered the plane. High program raitings and an almost claustrophobic atmosphere means the hackers have to work almost under the security spiders noses. As of this writing my players havn't persued this option at all, even a tantalizing prospect I threw at them for a social engineering aspect that would have led to a subplot tale of blackmail and betrayal, oh well.
The plane-After all that work on either path the plane's node is designed to be deliberately anticlimatic, partially because it's very utilitarian and partially because no one other then responsible users is sposed to be that far. Some ICE plus high progam and system ratings, but if the hacker gets in without setting fof an alert she's pretty much home free other then not arousing any suspcion while she does some judicious pregormaing on the agents that fly the plane and disables the sensors.

As of this writing my players are quickly approaching the 24 hour mark in which the hack has to make place. The rigger and gun bunnies are doing final preparations on the air sled and chasing down some leads. The mages are recuperating from summoning and binding high force spirits. Likewise for the technomancer who will soon be moving onto the chase plane and starting her probing on the FAA system. The face has mostly been out of it other then procuring gear for the team on the black market. Unfortunately for her they didn't follow up on the hook that might have got her more heavily involved but that's hardly my fault.

[Dixie Flatline]

Slightly off-topic, but worth mentioning I think: These runners have enemies that have considerable resources. How will these enemies respond if the runners hit assets as large as a Prime team, their equipment, AND the private-jet they flew in on? If nothing else, even if the runners pulled the hack AND covered their tracks, those responsible for sending the team would probably have the leverage, and I'd even guess some evidence, to link the PCs to the crash. This evidence means they can then turn transportation authorities onto the hunt, making the PCs far more hunted than before.

If you've pissed people off, deal with it in a way that isn't going to create other enemies if possible. If you've got smart PCs (the characters themselves, not the players), this is something for them to think about.

Planes often use something called ILS (instrument landing system) to guide a plane on it's glide path to the runway.

ILS on Wikipedia

It's especially useful in near-zero visibility (fog, rain, snow, etc), because it's wireless and ground based. If you read how it works today, it uses modulation of a broadcast frequency to adjust the glidepath of the incoming plane. Crashing the gulfstream would be as easy in this case as sitting out in front of the runway with a large parabolic antenna and blowing say 150hz at the airplane, blowing out the ILS frequency by stepping on it. This would result in the altitude being miscalculated by the horizon situation indicator (HSI) and the plane would adjust by lowering it's altitude to bring it in line with the proper glide path.

Stepping on the ILS signal, you'd make the plane happily glide directly into the ground, crashing and burning, without any evidence of any tampering beyond the black box showing that the plane followed ILS directly down into the ground.

If you allow ILS in your world. Which it's probable that it still exists in 2072. After all, it's cheap, reliable, and most importantly, it works. Some hacking might be involved, but at that point, I'd go for KISS. If I could find something that would corrode electronics in record-time (say 24 hours?) I'd crack open the physical transmitter on the ILS system, short it out, and glide the target into the ground with a fake ILS signal. The ILS would wreak havoc on any further planes due in for a landing. The jet's blackbox itself would show the plane to be pristine, as no hacking took place, and it wouldn't look like foul play. It'd look like weather got into a casing by sheer bad luck and it happened to bring a plane down and f*ck with a bunch of other planes at the same time.

One in a million chance, but hey, it could happen. Then, as an enterprising young shadowrunner, I'd look into taking a vacation from the area and letting things cool down. If I couldn't, I'd get in touch with a young, hungry reporter and feed them anonymous information that maybe, just maybe, that freak accident was a move by the corporate opponents of those who owned the jet, and it's the start of a corp war. If I'm REALLY lucky, the reporter will run with it, the story will splash all over the place, and the natural paranoia of the strike team employers will distract them from the shadowrunners... at least for now...

[LurkerOutThere]

Except your scenario presumes

1) No one will notice the ILS going out or detect the tampering.
2) No one will notice the new ILS signal being beamed at the sky (remember even wtiha parabolic there is some "scatter")
3) The plane is landing on pure ILS (meaning a heavy fog or storm situation) and even then the plane doesn't notice when the ILS doesn't match it's own instrumentation.


Even after the fact those systems are regularly maintained and checked (or at leas they are in theory) so the crash investigtion will point to foul play if some kind of corrosive agent was used.

[Ascalaphus]

I still think my solution is easier.

If you convince local air defense that the offending plane is actually a hostile plane masquerading as a friendly, it'll be mistrusted at least. If it then does some wonky things, it might get shot down. Even if is isn't shot down, it'll be trapped in red tape for a while.

Making a plane do wonky things isn't so hard either; give it some confusing radar input perhaps, to trick it into taking evasive maneuvers where no danger is apparent.

The key is this: bombing payloads can be so devastating, that you just can't take any risks with potential enemy planes with WMDs. And it makes sense that an enemy plane will try to convince you that it's not an enemy, so any protestations of innocence will be met with paranoia.

[LurkerOutThere]

Ascalaphus you've basically just said "My plan is simple, i'll just convince people to give me a million dollars."

Your missing a few steps before your PROFIT! step. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Dixie Flatline]

Except your scenario presumes

1) No one will notice the ILS going out or detect the tampering.
2) No one will notice the new ILS signal being beamed at the sky (remember even wtiha parabolic there is some "scatter")
3) The plane is landing on pure ILS (meaning a heavy fog or storm situation) and even then the plane doesn't notice when the ILS doesn't match it's own instrumentation.


Even after the fact those systems are regularly maintained and checked (or at leas they are in theory) so the crash investigtion will point to foul play if some kind of corrosive agent was used.

1. When ILS is most used is probably aprox. 30 seconds before landing. By the time anyone noticed that the signal was out, the plane is hosed.

2. You want it to look like a hardware failure preceded by inappropriate signal being beamed out, akin to a short. I'd *hope* people/other planes got screwed up signal.

3. So you're saying a small private jet would have glide paths for every single runway in the world? I guess you could say that the pilot program in the jet could be uploaded with the appropriate glide path as part of it's flight plan, but at that point you're giving discretion to a plane and not the airport that it's landing at, which seems exactly opposite of how such things go. Still, your game, your call.

Even if maintenance is done routinely on the system (assuming it's out in the weather to begin with), chances are it'd be essentially a written report that everything checks out okay from private subcontractor XYZ, by Technician Bob. That kind of thing is quickly verifiable and *might* even be public record. At that point, you have a box that looks cracked open (vandalism maybe? Who cares what they think) and a natural looking saltwater corrosion inside. Logical conclusion: Technician Bob was shirking hauling his butt out to the far end of the runway to check out the box, and falsified reports.

It's still a long, long shot, but it's a different, relatively hack-light approach to bringing the plane down. I honestly doubt even that in 60 years they'd be using the same system. Hell, I could easily see flight controllers being matrix/riggers who take control of a plane to bring it into the airport on final approach, eliminating ILS entirely. The auto-flight program would only be used at cruising altitudes. It's probably how I would do it personally.

Still, if I was a player I'd hope you'd give me points for thinking *really* outside the box.

Here's an even more low-tech solution to bring a plane down. If it's a turbojet engine-driven jet (I'm assuming ramjets aren't exactly standard equipment on a private commuter jet), you buy the cheapest aerial drone, strap a dead seagull or three onto it, and when the plane is coming in on final approach in a nice straight line, your rigger flies the drone into the engine intake. Plane goes down if done at the right moment, initial investigation shows bird bits in the engine, and in six months when UCAS FCC realizes that there's way more tech bits in the wreckage than a simple bird-strike would account for, you've already changed your name and hopefully laid low.

Or how about bribing UCAS customs to put a freeze on the cargo container full of weaponry & equipment for 24 hours. Even if you delay them getting their equipment by one hour, that's an hour you can hit them without being loaded to bear. Assuming of course that this team doesn't fly into an international airport loaded up and armored up to the point of being a walking tank, which would be incredibly unlikely.

Or rat them out to their rival megacorp who wants to bloody the parent corp's nose and smear egg in their eye. Some idiotic division head surely wants revenge or to make a name for themselves and will either gear the team up or bring in primes of their own.

Also, back to your original post about the fallout from taking out a prime runner team. It depends on a couple things that I could see. If it's a "sanctioned" job, the heat would most likely be turned up a notch or three, and not necessarily in the form of another prime team. Contacts would be shaken down, reputation would be attacked, any and everything that could isolate the runners probably would be pulled out. Prime runner teams are expensive to train and equip, and it's a significant credit value attached to the mission. If it's not a "sanctioned" mission (meaning that it's one division head with a grudge, or prime runner response hasn't been approved, etc etc), that might very well be the end of the issue for a long time, as the puppetmaster in question has just wasted significant resources without permission.

That's entirely up to you and depends entirely on what the runners were doing.

This post has been edited by Dixie Flatline: Feb 23 2010, 07:06 AM

[Scoot]

ILS is actually on the way out in 2010 (really, 2007 was the major start). The systems coming into use today are GNSS WAAS (GPS with an accuracy boosting signal) and ADS-B (Automatic Dependant Surveilance-Broadcast, a traffic locating system). The plane is capable of being flown on autopilot most of the way on GPS - Automatically to the ground on higher class jets.

Aviation has a history of being VERY slow to accept new technology. It took a LONG time for GPS systems to be approved for operations like this.

As far as every runway in the world having this kind of guidance: The technology and approval to use WAAS approaches was given fairly recently, has almost the same weather minimums as ILS, and already is commonly in use. According to the FAA, there are currently 1975 WAAS LPV (the very accurate kind) approaches approved for use in the US, with 46 of them having been added in the past 56 days. These cover a variety of airports:
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headqu...pvLocations.cfm

As far as smaller aircraft: It is quite true that many newer models have been leaving the production line with fairly capable Auto Pilots, but this kind of aircraft would be getting flown BY the person inside, not by an external rigger. Anyone who would have one of these for private flight would be flying for themselves, or else they would just take commercial transport.

For crashing purposes, your autopilot SHOULD be able to respond to terrain and traffic alerts. It should climb if it senses terrain too close. It should descend if the plane loses cabin pressure at high altitude. The only thing that should over-ride this is a pilot's direct input.

Finally, I would point out: Does this particular aircraft have rigger adaptation? Otherwise, it sorta NEEDS a pilot on board.

[crizh]

That link is broken btw, you did it backwards and the url has had a contraction slipped into somewhere....

GPS is no safer than ILS when it comes to deliberate interference. I've been able to block the signal with a low-end FM transmitter for my iPod.

The real question here is do the runners really want to capture the plane or do they just need to destroy it?

As previously mentioned a Heimdall is going to seriously mess up it's day. Job done.

For more sophistication I recommend Intruder (Activator) Nanites. Delivery method is up to you.

How about you put them in Nanoinfectors, inject those into a seagull and have a possession spirit fly it into an air-intake at take-off? You could rig the seagull instead but that might leave more evidence and be more inconvenient to set up.

Either way you own the plane from the moment it leaves the ground, you have plenty of time to subvert it's systems and lay false trails for investigators. Then when the time is right you cause some sort of distraction, turn off it's transponder and drop it below Radar and have an appropriately modified drone pop up and take it's place on the screens before 'crashing' hundreds of miles away where a search is going to be nigh impossible and a few bits of charred wreckage will sell your story long enough for a clean get-away.

[LurkerOutThere]

1. When ILS is most used is probably aprox. 30 seconds before landing. By the time anyone noticed that the signal was out, the plane is hosed.

I don't know why you presume this considing the ILS system is basically a constant beacon, I also don't know why you presume it's a single point of failure.

3. So you're saying a small private jet would have glide paths for every single runway in the world? I guess you could say that the pilot program in the jet could be uploaded with the appropriate glide path as part of it's flight plan, but at that point you're giving discretion to a plane and not the airport that it's landing at, which seems exactly opposite of how such things go. Still, your game, your call.

No what i figure is when you use your magic parabalic beacon to try and crash the plane and the instructions it's getting don't jive with what the planes sensors give back the plane is at the very least going to signal the tower for attention and back way it's approach.

Still, if I was a player I'd hope you'd give me points for thinking *really* outside the box.

You could have an extra dew sure, but just because you think you've found a single point of failure doesn't mean someone else hasn't already thought about it. What i'd likely do is let you look into that option and see what it would actually take to do that. (Which would probly be a case of nailing both a primary, a backup, and possibly a teritary, then you'd have to have the weather be bad enough for it to be relying on ILM, plus you'd need to take the planes own sensors out of the equation. Basically, and i'm fairly up front about this in my games, captian kirk solutions don't work against HVT's.

Crizh - Why do you believe nanites would survive going through the intake? YOur point is valid but personally i pretty much pretend infector nanites don't exist as players always think their really cool until their used against them. With that caveat that's more or less my teams plan.

[crizh]

Oh, I'm sure some would survive. It was just fluff really, it could hit the plane anywhere or be delivered by an entirely different vector.

You're right though. Once you start messing with nano-tech you would be a fool not to start working up counter-measures. They are obscenely powerful if used cleverly.

[cndblank]

Please....just....stop. Okay, your analogy about programming code breaks down pretty spectacularly because it presumes no outside QA is being done on the system in question. What that means in layman's terms is we can assume for a plane someone has sat down and tried to break the system in every possible way they could think of, then handed it off to someone else to do the same then they've come up with every precaution based on that laundry list that wasn't A) too expensive to implement B) precluded by some necessary functionality. For the former The threshold is rather high as this is a 1 and change million dollar airframe designed to haul VIP's around in comfort and anonymity. For B there are certain conceits that are going in, both for in universe factors and just ease of play. Then we need to assume that even before the players came along someone has tried, either successfully or not to bring down a plane. In either case steps were likely taken as long as they didn't conflict with A or B above.

Amen.

Two things to remember.

One is that hardware always beats software. If you want to spend the time and money you can make a hacker proof system short of social engineering or sabotage or subversion of the hardware.

And if the risks are high enough they will. Especially after high profile events like nine eleven. Look at the time and money spent to prevent another one.

Two is has someone tried this before.

So could someone hack a passing tractor trailer rig and use it to ram a police blockade?

Sure, but the rig is going to have a hardwired manual override and the driver is going to hit the minute he things something is wrong.
That means that the hacker has all of five or ten seconds to do what ever he wants before the dog brain is disconnected.

[cndblank]

Please....just....stop. Okay, your analogy about programming code breaks down pretty spectacularly because it presumes no outside QA is being done on the system in question. What that means in layman's terms is we can assume for a plane someone has sat down and tried to break the system in every possible way they could think of, then handed it off to someone else to do the same then they've come up with every precaution based on that laundry list that wasn't A) too expensive to implement B) precluded by some necessary functionality. For the former The threshold is rather high as this is a 1 and change million dollar airframe designed to haul VIP's around in comfort and anonymity. For B there are certain conceits that are going in, both for in universe factors and just ease of play. Then we need to assume that even before the players came along someone has tried, either successfully or not to bring down a plane. In either case steps were likely taken as long as they didn't conflict with A or B above.

Amen.

Two things to remember.

One is that hardware always beats software. If you want to spend the time and money you can make a hacker proof system short of social engineering or sabotage and subversion of the hardware.

And if the risks are high enough they will. Especially after high profile events like nine eleven. Look at the time and money spent to prevent another one.

Two is has someone tried this before.

So could someone hack a passing tractor trailer rig and use it to ram a police blockade?

Sure, but the rig is going to have a hardwired manual override and the driver is going to hit it as soon as he things something is wrong.
That means that the hacker has all of five or ten seconds to do what ever he wants before the dog brain is disconnected.