CVE-2026-44470

Claude Desktop: Local Privilege Escalation via Directory Junction in CoworkVMService

State: Published
Severity: 8.5 High
Published: May 13, 2026
Updated: May 13, 2026
Reserved: May 6, 2026

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.

Scores

CVSS	Score	Vector	Source
4.0	8.5 High	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	GitHub_M

Weaknesses

CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access ('Link Following')
CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

Affected Products

Product	Versions
claude-codeanthropics	< 1.3834.0Affected

References

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/security/advisories/GHSA-5p5x-5294-qhp3

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