Trilium Notes: macOS TCC Bypass via Prompt Spoofing

Description

Trilium Notes is a cross-platform, hierarchical note taking application focused on building large personal knowledge bases. In versions 0.102.1 and prior, the Electron configuration is vulnerable to TCC Bypass via Prompt Spoofing, allowing local attackers to trigger misleading macOS permission prompts by running malicious code under the identity of the trusted app. The root cause is that the RunAsNode fuse allows launching the app in a special Node.js mode using -e to execute arbitrary system commands with Trilium Notes's permissions and identity. An attacker can leverage this through a subprocess to request any sensitive permissions, such as access to hardware (camera, microphone) and TCC-protected files, causing the TCC system prompt to appear as if the request came from Trilium rather than the attacker's code, because macOS treats the subprocess as part of the parent application. Exploitation allows access to TCC-protected resources like the screen, camera, microphone, and folders such as ~/Documents and ~/Downloads, undermining macOS's security model and UI integrity through social engineering. This issue has been fixed in version 0.102.2.

Scores

EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)

0.18% · top 93% of all CVEs (6 Nov 2026)

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Medium 5.5.

Weakness

• CWE-451: User Interface (UI) Misrepresentation of Critical Information (opens in a new tab)All about CWE-451 and its CVEs
• CWE-290: Authentication Bypass by Spoofing (opens in a new tab)All about CWE-290 and its CVEs

Affected products

• TriliumNext · Trilium

  • affected < 0.102.2

References (2)

• https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium/security/advisories/GHSA-66pm-8hvq-2wwx (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_CONFIRMexploit
• https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium/releases/tag/v0.102.2 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC

Sources

The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.

• CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
• CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
• NVD (opens in a new tab)
• FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
• OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
• GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
• CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)

Badge for a README or a ticket

[![CVE-2026-39309](https://trackcve.app/badge/CVE-2026-39309.svg)](https://trackcve.app/cve/CVE-2026-39309)

Record last updated 20 May 2026, 15:45 UTC.