Recently, Tropic Square, the company responsible for the first safe element chips, has been involved in Tropic Square (Safe elements) Open source for wallets and bitcoin technology, she was the winner of the award Embedded awards for safety and protection It was delivered to the Embedded World 2025 Conference held in Nuremberg. This company is a branch of Satoshi Lab, the company that creates Wallet Tresol.
Tropic01 was the winner for a reason. This secure element chip is important in the Bitcoin hardware industry from others. Safe elements Openantn, which currently exists, is more focused on servers and industrial infrastructure. The launch of this chip occurs in historical and technical contexts. If the safest element chip is closed, private architecture, Avoid the deep auditability of these microprocessors.
Existing closed code security elements do not allow auditing. Therefore, safety engineers and experts cannot confirm the presence of vulnerabilities or rear doors. Meanwhile, Tropic01 gives engineers confidence in what integrates into their devices by allowing them to verify their security implementations themselves.
Jan Pleskac, Technology Director and Co-Founder at Tropic Square.
For example, as the company responsible for cryptocurrency wallets states, CC EAL5+ and CC EAL6+ certified chips integrated into ledger devices are closed codes.
According to a press release, the company behind Open Architecture Insurance Chip announced the official release of Tropic01 on February 24, 2025, after Cryptoics reported at the end of 2022 on February 24, 2022.
First of all, what are the safe elements?
and The safe element is generally small chips, with semiconductor materials with integrated circuits that can perform a variety of functions when implemented in electronic devices. These chips They are designed to protect sensitive information within these devices.
These chips act as a secure way to maintain data from important electronic systems such as passwords, credit card information, and private cryptocurrency keys.
When integrated into a device, the secure element ensures that only regular or authorized people can access sensitive information. Therefore, these chips are safeguards against hackeos, physical attempts to violate cryptocurrency wallets and other gadgets with critical capabilities.
Tropic01 is the first of these secure elements designed for cryptographic active wallets that run in open source.
What is Tropic01?
According to the definition of chips provided by Tropic Square, Tropic01 is the first in its class Adapt to the infrastructure of decentralized systems and cryptocurrency wallets.
Tropic01 is an innovative security element designed to provide modern generation protection for open architecture operations. This establishes unprecedented standards of transparency, collaboration and confidence in hardware security. Based on the RISC-V architecture, TROPIC01 offers advanced protection for hardware cryptocurrency wallets, IoT devices, and distributed infrastructure.
Tropic Square, Tropic01 Manufacturer
The open source of Tropic01 is due to the fact that it is based on RISC-V, a free and free hardware instruction (ISA), and anyone can contribute to chip code using this instruction game. An instruction set is a detailed command written in machine language, executed by a central processing unit that is ingrained in hardware.
Additionally, according to Tropic Square, Tropic01 has the following set of characteristics and benefits:
- “Clients, industry experts and the open source community are fully auditable, ensuring transparency and trust.”
- Bitcoin wallets and cryptocurrency or decentralized infrastructure “combining the flexibility to adapt advanced features to the specific needs of the system.”
- It is opened with the consequences of the vulnerability. Tropic Square guarantees “full transparency with the publication of test results.”
In the opinion of the company that designed it, Tropic01 is operation-resistant and guarantees encryption capabilities that protect the device’s security.
The Safe Tropic01 element is built with advanced course-resistant technology to manipulate and attack, ensuring robust asset protection and protects electronics from a wide range of possible attacks. Provides and stores the encryption key for embedded systems. The system implementation of TROPIC01 eliminates vulnerabilities by protecting assets, managing cryptographic functions, reducing the load on microcontroller units (MCUs), and significantly reducing attack surfaces.
Tropic Square is the manufacturer of Tropic01.
The company also announced the technical specifications of the Tropic01 on its official website.
These specifications represent measurements that protect the chip from physical manipulation (using electromagnetic pulses, changing voltages delivered, changes in device temperature and perforation), and attacks that accelerate or optimize the speed of cryptographic operations.
For example, Tropic01 can detect electromagnetic pulses (EMP), electromagnetic energy bursts This can be used to interrupt or compromise the operation of the device. Although it doesn’t specify which measures activate EMP detection, a general rule is that devices with this protection can protect their devices by erasing sensitive data or entering blockages.
Meanwhile, voltage fault detector Identify abnormal fluctuations in the supply voltage.Glitch attack«, a classic way to violate the safety of electronic devices. These attacks manipulate voltages to change the normal flow of processor execution. When identifying these attacks, the device can disable operations or erase memory to protect data, but it is not explained as specific to the Tropic Square website.
Meanwhile, temperature detectors monitor extreme temperature changes It can destroy critical components and show physical operation attempts that allow access to the chip. Again, no specific response to temperature attacks is specified, but it is estimated that Tropic01 can perform important deletions or similar measures.
Finally, the active shield (Active Shield) It is a physical or electronic mechanism (such as a protective layer or conductive mesh) It can wrap the tip and detect openings and drilling attempts. If the shield is compromised, you can activate a safety response, such as eliminating sensitive data.
As for accelerators, Tropic01 uses something dedicated to elliptic curves, an asymmetric encryption method used in the Bitcoin protocol to protect private digital companies. It also uses a SHA-256-specific algorithm that executes a Bitcoin hash function and converts the protocol dataset to a fixed length. This algorithm helps generate private and public keys in Bitcoin.
The implementation of these specific crypto accelerators is the creation of hardware wallets that are particularly improved and auditable, as Tropic01 is considered a critical chip for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industries.
Now, in addition to its development kit, Tropic Square sends Tropic01 tests to manufacturers and developers to facilitate chip integration and “providing the tools and resources needed to test and develop secure applications.”
(tagstotranslate)Hardware
