CVE-2026-44467: Claude Desktop: SSH Host Key Verification Bypass Allows Man-in-the-Middle Attack on Remote Sessions

The Claude Desktop app gives you Claude Code with a graphical interface built for running multiple sessions side by side. From 1.2581.0 to before 1.4304.0, Claude Desktop's SSH remote development feature verified only whether a hostname existed in ~/.ssh/knownhosts without comparing the server's presented host key against the stored key. This allowed a network-positioned attacker to present an arbitrary SSH host key and have the connection silently accepted, enabling a man-in-the-middle attack on remote development sessions. Successful exploitation required the attacker to be in a network position to intercept SSH traffic (e.g., via ARP spoofing, rogue Wi-Fi, or DNS poisoning) and the target hostname to already have an entry in the victim's knownhosts file. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4304.0.