Trilium Notes: macOS TCC Bypass via Prompt Spoofing

Summary

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.