Vulnerability · Published May 13, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-44470Claude Desktop: Local Privilege Escalation via Directory Junction in CoworkVMService
High 8.5
In plain English
A high-severity privilege mismanagement in claude-code from anthropics. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 5% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
The Claude Desktop app gives you Claude Code with a graphical interface built for running multiple sessions side by side. Prior to 1.3834.0, the CoworkVMService component in Claude Desktop for Windows ran as SYSTEM and did not validate whether the VM bundle directory was a real directory or an NTFS directory junction before creating files within it. A local non-elevated user could replace the user-writable VM bundle directory with a directory junction pointing to an attacker-chosen location, causing the service to create a SYSTEM-owned file in an arbitrary directory. This could be leveraged for local privilege escalation. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.3834.0.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| anthropics | claude-code | < 1.3834.0 |
Weakness: CWE-59, CWE-269 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N