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"AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty)" by Stanislav Fort
28 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What recent vulnerabilities were discovered in OpenSSL?
AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero days, while Curl cancelled its bug bounty.
By Stanislav Fort. Published on January 27, 2026.
This is a partial follow-up to I'll Discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025. TLDR. OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and audited cryptographic libraries on the planet, underpinning encryption for most of the Internet. They just announced 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning previously unknown to maintainers at time of disclosure.
We at I'll discovered all 12 using our AI system. This is a historically unusual count and the first real-world demonstration of AI-based cybersecurity at this scale. Meanwhile, Curl just cancelled its bug bounty program due to a flood of AI-generated spam, even as we reported five genuine CVEs to them.
Chapter 2: How did AI contribute to the discovery of these vulnerabilities?
AI is simultaneously collapsing the median, slop, and raising the ceiling real zero days in critical infrastructure. Heading Background We at ILE have been building an automated AI system for deep cybersecurity discovery and remediation, sometimes operating in bug bounties under the pseudonym Giant and Eater.
Our goal was to turn what used to be an elite, artisanal hacker craft into a repeatable industrial process. We do this to secure the software infrastructure of human civilization before strong AI systems become ubiquitous. Prisaically, we want to make sure we don't get hacked into oblivion the moment they come online.
No reliable cybersecurity benchmark reaching the desired performance level exists yet. We therefore decided to test the performance of our AI system against live targets.
The clear benefit of this is that for a new, zero-day security vulnerability to be accepted as meriting a CVE, a unique vulnerability identifier, it has to pass an extremely stringent judgment by the long-term maintainers and security team of the project, who are working under many incentives not to do so.
Beyond just finding bugs, the issue must fit within the project's security posture, that is what they consider important enough to warrant a CVE.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did the Curl bug bounty program face?
OpenSSL is famously conservative here. many reported issues are fixed quietly or rejected entirely. Therefore our benchmark was completely external to us and in some cases intellectually adversarial. We chose to focus on some of the most well-audited, secure, and heavily tested pillars of the world software ecosystem. Among them, OpenSSL stands out.
Industry estimates suggest that at least two-thirds of the world's internet traffic is encrypted using OpenSSL and a single zero-day vulnerability in it can define a security researcher's career.
It is a very hard target to find real, valuable security issues in. Heading Fall 2025
Our first OpenSSL results. In late summer 2025, six months into starting our research, we tested our AI system against OpenSSL and found a number of real, previously unknown security issues.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the 12 zero-day vulnerabilities found?
In the full 2025 OpenSSL security release, four CVEs in total were announced from 2025 of the format. There's a code block here in the text, out of which three were found, responsibly disclosed, and in some cases even fixed by us, or more precisely by our AI system. You can read more in our original blog post. Specifically, these were two moderate severity issues. CVE-2025-9230.
Out-of-bounds read-write in the RFC3211KEK unwrap operation for CMS password-based encryption, potentially leading to memory corruption or code execution. This bug had been present since 2009, undetected for over 15 years. CVE 2025-9231.
Timing side channel in SM2 elliptic curve signatures on 64-bit ARM, where variations in execution time during modular arithmetic could in principle allow private key recovery through careful remote observation. This is a subtle, logic-level vulnerability where the correctness of the code obscured a timing leak that only emerged under specific hardware conditions.
Chapter 5: How does AI influence the future of cybersecurity?
We also found a single low-severity CVE. CVE 2025-9232. Out-of-bounds read in HTTP client. There's a code block here in the text. Handling when parsing IPv6 hosts, triggering a controlled crash.
Independently, the Frontier of the Year 2025 forecasting project by Gavin Leach, Lauren Gilbert, and Ulka Ageva looked out for AI-driven vulnerability discovery in critical infrastructure as one of the top AI breakthroughs of 2025, assigning it a 0.9 probability of generalizing and placing it at number three overall by expected impact, resolving as, quote,
Google's big sleep agent and the startup aisle found dozens of critical vulnerabilities in some of the main infrastructure of the internet. Linux, Curl, OpenSSL, and SQLite. Frontier of the year 2025.
End quote.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI in vulnerability discovery?
For context on our approach, our system handles the full loop equals scanning, analysis, triage, exploit construction, if needed and possible, patch generation, and patch verification. Humans choose targets and act as high-level pilots overseeing and improving the system, but don't perform the vulnerability discovery.
On high-profile targets, we additionally review the resulting fixes and disclosures manually to ensure quality, although this only rarely changes anything. Heading. January 2026. 12 out of 12 new vulnerabilities. Just today, January 27, 2026, OpenSSL announced a new security patch release, publishing 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities, including a very rare high-severity one.
Of the 12 announced, we at Al discovered every single one of them using our AI system. One vulnerability, CVE-2025-11187, was also co-reported by a security researcher Hamza from Metadust 33 days after our initial disclosure. Congratulations on representing humanity in this virtuous race.
Chapter 7: How do OpenSSL maintainers respond to AI-generated findings?
Party popper! Out of the 12 new CVEs, 10 were assigned.
There's a code block here in the text. Identifiers and 2 already belong to the year 2026 with. There's a code block here in the text. S adding this to the 3 out of. 4. CVEs we already had in 2025 previously, this means that ILE, and by extension AI in general, is responsible for discovering 13 out of 14 zero-day vulnerabilities in OpenSSL in 2025.
Both the count and the relative proportion have been increasing as a function of time and are overall historically very atypical. The 12 vulnerabilities span a significant breadth of OpenSSL's code base.
Chapter 8: What does the future hold for AI in cybersecurity?
Here they are sorted by severity. Subheading. High severity, 1.
CVE 2025-15467. Stack buffer overflow in CMS auth enveloped data parsing. The overflow occurs prior to any cryptographic verification, meaning no valid key material is required to trigger it, making it potentially remotely exploitable against any application parsing untrusted CMS content. For context, high severity or above CVEs in OpenSSL have historically averaged less than 1 per year.
Subheading. Moderate severity, 1.
CVE 2025-11187. Stack buffer overflow and null pointer dereference in PBM AC1 parameter validation during PKCS number 12 MAC verification.
Co-reported by Hamza from Metadust 33 days after our disclosure. Subheading. Low severity, 10.
CVE for 2025-15 for 68, CVE for 2025-15 for 69, CVE for 2025-66199. CVE 2025-68160 CVE 2025-69418 CVE 2025-69419 CVE 2025-69420 CVE 2025-69421 CVE 2026-22795 CVE 2026-22796 Listed primarily for completeness sake.
These span QUIC, PKCS number 12, PKCS number 7, CMS, TLS 1.3, and BIO subsystems, including heap overflows, type confusions, null dereferences, and a cryptographic bug where OCB mode leaves trailing bytes unencrypted and unauthenticated. Three of these bugs date even back to 1998-2000, having lurked undetected for 25-27 years.
One of them, CVER 2026-22796, predates OpenSSL itself and was inherited from SS Lee, Eric Young's original SSL implementation from the 1990s. Yet it remained undetected by the heavy human and machine scrutiny over the quarter century. Even at low severity CVE is a higher bar than might be obvious. The vast majority of reported issues don't qualify as security vulnerabilities at all.
Of those that do, most are bugs that get fixed without CVEs as standard PRS. To receive a CVE from OpenSSL, an issue must pass their conservative security posture and be deemed important enough to track formally. Low severity in OpenSSL still means a real, externally validated security vulnerability in well-audited critical infrastructure.
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