CVE-2026-35603 PUBLISHED

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

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 03.04.2026 Published: 17.04.2026 Updated: 20.04.2026

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.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:P/PR:L/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 5.4

Product Status

Vendor anthropics
Product claude-code
Versions
  • Version < 2.1.75 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-426: Untrusted Search Path CWE