Cipher: an AI agent found four EPICS Base flaws in under four hours

01What happened

Causal Security reported four memory-safety flaws in EPICS Base to the project's security channel on June 9, 2026, then coordinated CVE assignment with CISA. CISA published advisory ICSA-26-300-01 on October 27, 2026, the same day EPICS Base 7.0.11 shipped and Causal Security published its write-up. CISA credits Shubham Raj of Cipher / Causal Security for the reports.

02How it works

Cipher traced wire-controlled counts, lengths and decoded types through unfamiliar C++ code to the points where they size allocations, index memory or are cast. Three of the flaws sit in the Channel Access protocol and one in classic pvAccess deserialization, where an integer overflow, an extended-header length overflow, an unchecked element count and a type confusion produce out-of-bounds writes and reads. Causal Security says the agent built the affected components in a sandbox and reproduced every bug under AddressSanitizer or a debugger, each checked against a negative control.

03Who is affected

EPICS Base release 7.0.10 and earlier are affected, in Channel Access and classic pvAccess servers. CISA lists the deployment as worldwide in the critical manufacturing sector; EPICS is an open-source toolkit for distributed control systems at research and industrial facilities. Vendor distributions and custom IOCs may carry the same parsing code.

04What to do

Upgrade EPICS Base 7 deployments to 7.0.11, or obtain a supported vendor backport. Restrict Channel Access and pvAccess services, and their discovery traffic, to the control hosts and networks that need them. Confirm whether packaged components include epics-base pull requests 934 and 937 and pvDataCPP pull request 109, which CISA lists as the fixes.

Questions people ask

Which EPICS Base versions are affected by CVE-2026-114595?

EPICS Base release 7.0.10 and all earlier releases are affected, according to CISA advisory ICSA-26-300-01. The fix is EPICS Base 7.0.11, published on October 27, 2026. Sites running vendor distributions or custom IOCs should confirm whether their packaged components include the upstream fixes, since a repackaged build may still carry the vulnerable parsing code.

Did Cipher demonstrate remote code execution in EPICS Base?

Causal Security states that Cipher did not demonstrate remote code execution. The agent reproduced a heap buffer overflow write, a constrained out-of-bounds write and two out-of-bounds reads, each causing a crash. CISA's advisory says handling of attacker-supplied data may lead to memory corruption, denial of service or potential remote code execution, so the ceiling is CISA's assessment rather than a working exploit.

How much human help did Cipher need to find the EPICS flaws?

Causal Security reports one human instruction across the whole investigation, authorizing deeper exploitability testing inside a secure sandbox. Everything else, from reading unfamiliar code to building the affected components and reproducing each bug under AddressSanitizer, ran without intervention. These timings and autonomy claims are Causal Security's own account of its agent, published alongside the CISA advisory, and no independent party has reproduced them.

Is there any sign EPICS Base is being attacked?

CISA reports no known public exploitation specifically targeting these four EPICS Base vulnerabilities at the time its advisory was published. Causal Security disclosed privately in June 2026 and withheld reproduction payloads from its write-up. Operators still have an exposure window, because the fixes reached users only with 7.0.11 on October 27, three months after the first one was merged.

Sources 3 links, all fetched

1. 1causalsecurity.comCausal Security Research
2. 2cisa.govCISA Advisory
3. 3github.comEPICS Base 7.0.11