CVE-2026-44470

HIGH

Claude Desktop: Local Privilege Escalation via Directory Junction in CoworkVMService

Title source: cna
STIX 2.1

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.

References (1)

Core 1
Core References

Scores

CVSS v3 7.8
EPSS 0.0016
EPSS Percentile 5.1%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CISA SSVC

Vulnrichment
Exploitation none
Automatable no
Technical Impact total

Details

CWE
CWE-269 CWE-59
Status published
Products (2)
anthropic/claude_desktop < 1.3834.0
anthropics/claude-code < 1.3834.0
Published May 13, 2026
Tracked Since May 13, 2026