EPICS Base 7.0.11 fixes four flaws an AI agent found in accelerator control software

CISA has published advisory ICSA-26-300-01 for four vulnerabilities in EPICS Base, the open source control system toolkit used to run particle accelerators, telescopes and other large research facilities. CISA credits “Shubham Raj of Cipher / Causal Security”; Cipher is the company’s AI agent.

The bugs

All four affect EPICS Base 7.0.10 and earlier and come from how network messages are parsed:

• CVE-2026-114595 (CVSS 3.1: 9.8, critical): an integer overflow in network request processing can allocate memory of the wrong size, which CISA says may lead to memory corruption, denial of service or potentially remote code execution.
• CVE-2026-114596: bad length validation can trigger an integer overflow and an out-of-bounds write, causing instability or denial of service.
• CVE-2026-114597 and CVE-2026-114598 (type confusion): insufficient validation of element or length values can read past a buffer, causing denial of service and possibly exposing adjacent memory.

The Register lists the other three as 8.2, 7.5 and 7.5. CISA’s advisory reports no known exploitation.

How to fix it

Update to EPICS Base 7.0.11, released on 27 October. Use the signed base-7.0.11.tar.gz file: the release notes warn that GitHub’s automatic “Source code” archives are incomplete and leave out the PVA submodules. CISA’s usual advice also applies: keep control system devices off the internet and behind firewalls, and isolate them from business networks.

The AI part

Causal Security co-founder Shubham Raj told The Register that Cipher found and validated all four bugs in three hours and 49 minutes, with “no human intervention” in the initial investigation, followed by one instruction authorizing deeper exploitability testing in a secure environment. Those are the vendor’s claims; neither CISA nor the EPICS project describes how the bugs were found. It adds to a run of AI-found vulnerabilities in widely used software this month, and to the argument that old, trusted network code is where these agents find the most.