Achieving Real CRA Compliance with Open Secure Elements

‍In the rush to prepare for the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), many hardware manufacturers are reaching for familiar tools – cryptographic libraries, secure bootloaders, and increasingly, secure elements. These components are vital, but too often, they’re treated like magic pills. Should we say: Add a secure element to your device, and you’re done?

A real CRA compliance demands more than feature checklists or hardened hardware. It requires process maturity, lifecycle thinking, and transparency built into every layer of the product. At Tropic Square, we believe secure elements are only valuable when embedded into a broader architecture – the one that’s open, auditable, and thoughtfully integrated from day one.

Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Tightly packaged, physically hardened, and purpose-built to protect secrets, secure elements are often seen as the quickest way to “tick the box” for secure key storage or device authentication.

But here’s the problem: CRA compliance doesn’t just ask what features your device has. It asks how they’re implemented, why they’re trustworthy, and whether they’ve been tested, documented, and maintained. First, understand how the secure chip fits into your threat model, software stack, and maintenance before plugging in.

Open Secure Elements: Tools for Product Lifecycle Assurance

The open secure element is designed from the ground up not only to protect assets, but to support CRA compliance through visibility, auditability, and integration support.

Unlike traditional elements, it offers a verifiable design that can be audited by your security team, external evaluators, or regulators. From tamper detection to cryptographic implementations, everything is inspectable. There are no NDAs, no black boxes. Just hardware and firmware you can trust – and prove.

But what makes the open secure element, such as TROPIC01, truly useful for CRA compliance is how it enables the lifecycle-oriented security:

• Manufacturing: Each TROPIC01 is provisioned with a unique identity, keys and certificate chain for traceable production and onboarding.
• Operation: 237 KiB of secure memory for keys and user’s data storage, PIN-based access control, mTLS handshake support, ECC signing of data and transactions and anti-tamper protections all anchor runtime protections in hardware.
• Updates: Immutable public keys, rollback protection, and signature verification examples enable secure boot and  secure firmware updates with version control.
• Auditability: Tamper-evident logs and attestation support help meet CRA requirements for traceability and forensic inspection.
• Decommissioning: Secure key erasure routines support end-of-life requirements for data protection.
• Vulnerabilities management: Open communications about discovered vulnerabilities and security patches

Real Compliance is Contextual

Compliance is not static. It’s not just about passing an audit. It's about operating securely, continuously, and under real-world conditions – the open secure element supports this because it was built with context in mind. 

It doesn’t assume one threat model or use case. It offers the flexibility to support device identity, secure update chains, and cryptographic operations in a variety of applications, i.e., IoT, hardware wallets, industrial control, and more.

And with SDKs, integration examples, and a reference CRA Package, it helps developers not just use the chip, but understand how it fits into the whole system from an architecture to the deployment.

Compliance is a Journey, Not a Checkbox

Secure elements like TROPIC01 are essential to advanced security and hardware integrity but the CRA compliance requires more – clear threat models, secure software integration, documentation, and long-term lifecycle support. 

Real product security isn’t just about whether it’s been tested, but about knowing not just what your security components do, but why you trust them, and how they behave over time.