Solar‐Blind Photodetectors for Polarization‐Enhanced Physically Unclonable Functions

Secure hardware authentication and reliable environmental sensing are essential for next‐generation information and IoT systems, yet conventional PUF strategies often struggle with limited entropy and vulnerability to environmental fluctuations. Solar‐blind photodetectors inherently suppress background interference, providing a stable physical foundation for security primitives, while polarization‐resolved detection introduces an additional information dimension that enriches entropy and enables dataset‐level reconfigurability. Building on these complementary advantages, we establish a dual‐function platform that integrates solar‐blind polarization photodetection with physically unclonable functions (PUFs) in β ‐Ga 2 O 3 microbelts. During a one‐time enrollment process, polarization‐dependent photocurrents are physically acquired and virtualized into a hardware‐derived dataset, from which cryptographic units can be programmatically retrieved. This architecture enables the construction of statistically balanced PUF matrices with high reproducibility and randomness. The combined use of solar‐blind stability and polarization‐driven entropy expansion yields polymorphic PUF responses through dataset‐level selection, which strongly resist machine learning attacks, as validated by Random Forest, K‐Nearest Neighbors, and Deep Neural Network models. This physics‐driven integration demonstrates a scalable paradigm where secure authentication and UV photodetection are intrinsically coupled at the material level, advancing hardware security for IoT edge and other challenging environments.