CVE-2026-35603

Claude Code: Insecure System-Wide Configuration Loading Enables Local Privilege Escalation on Windows

State
Published
Severity
5.4 Medium
Published
Apr 17, 2026
Updated
Apr 20, 2026
Reserved
Apr 3, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Claude Code is an agentic coding tool. In versions prior to 2.1.75 on Windows, Claude Code loaded the system-wide default configuration from C:\ProgramData\ClaudeCode\managed-settings.json without validating directory ownership or access permissions. Because the ProgramData directory is writable by non-administrative users by default and the ClaudeCode subdirectory was not pre-created or access-restricted, a low-privileged local user could create this directory and place a malicious configuration file that would be automatically loaded for any user launching Claude Code on the same machine. Exploiting this would have required a shared multi-user Windows system and a victim user to launch Claude Code after the malicious configuration was placed. This issue has been fixed on version 2.1.75.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.05.4 MediumCVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:L/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

Affected Products

ProductVersions
claude-codeanthropics
  • < 2.1.75Affected

References

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