Particulate Accelerators and Fusion Reactors: One AI agent finds four serious faults in EPICS in less than four hours

Cipher from Causal Security discovered and validated only four vulnerabilities, including a critical rating of 9.8, in the control toolbox used by ITER or Advanced Photon Source. CISA has issued an alert.

EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System), free software originally developed by the national laboratories in Los Alamos and Argonne, is piloting the equipment of about 90 major scientific and industrial installations worldwide, including the Advanced Photon Source in Argonne and the ITER fusion reactor control system. Four new vulnerabilities have just been discovered by Cipher, an autonomous AI agent from Causal Security, in three hours and 49 minutes.

Critical fault noted 9.8

The most serious (CVE-2026-114595, CVSS score of 9.8) is an integer exceedance that allows network data controlled by an attacker to write out of memory, with a risk of remote code execution. The other three, classified high (8.2 and twice 7.5), can cause crashes, illegitimate memory readings or denials of service. All touch EPICS Base and are corrected in version 7.0.11; American CISA published a notice Tuesday. According to Causal Security's co-founder, Shubham Raj, the initial investigation was conducted without human intervention, with only one instruction allowing further operational testing in an isolated environment.

The operation involves reaching the control network of the installation, which may be made possible by poor partitioning. In concrete terms, an attacker could bring down a controller in the midst of costly experience or even distort measures. The episode illustrates the increasing ease with which AI agents break down faults in industrial systems long protected by their only darkness; the same agent had already discovered attack roads in electrical grid systems, which were the subject of a CISA opinion on 8 October.