Tropic Square

Tropic Square is a hardware security company that designs and manufactures secure chips for cryptographic key protection and authentication. Their flagship product, TROPIC01, is a secure element chip built on an open, auditable architecture intended to address known vulnerabilities in traditional PIN verification and private key storage.

The TROPIC01 chip implements a proprietary mechanism called "MAC-and-Destroy" PIN verification. Unlike conventional approaches that store a PIN hash and use a retry counter — both of which are susceptible to glitching, rollback, and counter-reset attacks — MAC-and-Destroy uses irreversible hardware slot writes.

Each PIN attempt permanently consumes a physical memory slot via a KMAC (Keccak-based Message Authentication Code) operation, making replay, rollback, and state restoration attacks physically impossible.

Key security features of TROPIC01 include:

• No stored hash or retry counter to target
• Irreversible hardware state changes per attempt
• Chip-unique PUF (Physically Unclonable Function) keys at two cryptographic stages to protect against manufacturer backdoors
• Support for multiple independent PINs and a "Wiping PIN" that triggers self-destruction of memory under duress

Target applications include cryptocurrency hardware wallets (notably Trezor Safe 7), IoT devices, smart home systems, edge AI platforms, energy and grid infrastructure, and decentralized network infrastructure.

Tropic Square promotes an open architecture philosophy, encouraging independent security researchers and academics to audit, test, and attempt to break their hardware. TROPIC01 DevBoards are available for order globally for developers and researchers.