decryption processes. Furthermore, these traditional anti-counterfeiting strategies are easily duplicated and are unable to counter the growing number of forgery techniques because they are widely recognized. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new anti-counterfeiting materials and innovative encryption/decryption approaches to endow stored information with higher security.In recent decades, polymeric gels have been developed as novel materials with programmable 3D network structures that are adaptable and inclusive, showing great potential for applications in various fields such as soft robotics, tissue engineering and information storage. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Among these, smart gels that exhibit shape morphing or color changes when exposed to external stimuli (e.g., light, heat, electricity, magnetism, mechanical force, or chemicals) have gained much attention. [20][21][22][23] Owing to its unique stimulus-responsiveness, a smart polymeric gel has been proven to be an excellent candidate for information encryption/decryption, exhibiting dynamic information output and a much higher security level. In general, an anti-counterfeiting process consists of three steps: coding, encryption, and decryption. For smart gel-based information storage devices, the external stimulus is the key to the decryption, and the tunable optical properties of the gel are utilized for coding. In other words, the information loaded on the gel is invisible or fake under normal circumstances, and the recipient can obtain the desired message only when the encrypted message is exposed to a particular external stimulus.Although polymeric gel-based information storage devices (PGISDs) are still in their infancy, there has been strong worldwide interest in this field. However, no related review has provided an in-depth overview of gel-based information storage for anti-counterfeiting. This review provides a tutorial overview that summarizes the recent progress in PGISDs, focusing on the preparation methods for gels with adjustable optical properties, their encryption/decryption mechanisms, and how to improve the security level using their dimensions and colors. As depicted in Figure 1, anti-counterfeiting materials based on elaborate gel systems show excellent encryption/decryption behaviors by adjusting either their chemical colors in the presence or absence of UV irradiation or physical colors under visible light (absorption/transmittance, refraction/scattering, and interference/diffraction). Endowing gels that display polychromic colors with stored information can achieve multilevel Information security protection has a tremendous impact on human life, social stability and national security, leading to the rapid development of anti-counterfeiting materials and related techniques. However, the traditional stored information on hard or dry media is often static and lacks functions, which makes it challenging to deal with increasing and powerful counterfeiting technologies. Modified intelligent polymeric gels exhibit color...