embedded world Product Showcase: Tropic Square’s TROPIC01 Hardware Security Element

March 17, 2025

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In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, security is paramount. With countless new devices being connected to networks every second, it’s important to ensure these systems meet the critical and modern demands of transparency and trust.

Designed as an advanced open-architecture hardware security element (HSE) is the TROPIC01 from Tropic Square. The TROPIC01 enables transparency for critical applications like IoT devices, crypto hardware wallets, digital identity devices, and hardware authenticators with cryptographic key management, digital identity, and secure data storage.

Tropic Square’s TROPIC01 in Action

Built on RISC-V architecture, the TROPIC01 is a tamper-proof alternative to closed-architecture chips, enabling hardware protection on a customizable core. The on-chip RISC-V IBEX controller core supports secure firmware updates and customizable firmware upon request.

For memory, the HSE supports OTP (One-Time Programmable memory) for storing x.509 certificates and cryptographic keys, flash memory for general-purpose data and PIN verification storage, memory address scrambling, on-the-fly encryption for added security, and error correction code protection.

To protect systems against physical and software-based attacks, the HSE supports tamper resistance with a voltage glitch detector, temperature detector, electromagnetic pulse detector, laser detector, and active shield.

For entropy source, the security solution features Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) to enable a unique and unclonable hardware identity, as well as a True Random Number Generator (TRNG) for randomness in cryptographic operations.

The TROPIC01 hardware security element features a wide range of cryptographic protocols:

Elliptic Curve Cryptography:

• Ed25519 EdDSA signing
• P-256 ECDSA signing

Key Exchange:

• Diffie-Hellman X25519 key exchange

Hashing and Authentication:

• Keccak-based PIN authentication engine
• SHA256 and SHA512

Encryption Algorithms:

• AES256-GCM
• ISAP

Getting Started with Tropic Square’s TROPIC01

The TROPIC01 solution integrates with external systems via an SPI interface for application control and an encrypted communication channel with forward secrecy. It also enables integration support via a software driver for external host communication and a software development kit (SDK).

Additional Resources:

• Product page: https://www.tropicsquare.com/tropic01
• Product brief: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/67a4b8a23096bc77d4d941a8/67b82bd3b7f60bebae45104e_TROPIC01_Data_Brief_25.pdf
• Press release: https://tropicsquare.com/news-and-events/tropic-square-announces-official-launch-general-availability-of-tropic01---the-industrys-first-open-architecture-tamper-proof-secure-element