We Tried to Fool the TSA’s New Airport Shoe Scanner Using Gummy Worms at CES 2025. Here’s What Happened

You can pay for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Prescreening. To keep your shoes on while walking through airport security, but what about the rest of us who don’t particularly enjoy the indignity of shuffling our socks or — eek! — Bare soles on a floor with thousands of other shoes and feet scratching on it.

Read more: These are the official winners of the 2025 Best of CES award, given out by the CNET Group

In order to speed up the process and reduce the illness factor, the Transportation Security Administration is there CES 2025 in Las Vegas Showing off New technology lets you wear your shoes While checking shoes for prohibited items.

The premise is simple: you step onto the platform, placing each foot in a specific area. Millimeter wave technology scans your shoes and sends the data to a computer. When CNET’s Bridget Carey spotted the technology being demonstrated, she knew she had to shake things up and see how the new technology would respond to the TSA.

“Let’s make it interesting,” Curry said. “Maybe I should put something in my shoe and see what happens on the scanner.”

Carey placed a variety of small items, including dental floss, a gummy worm, a mustard packet and a plastic knife, inside her shoe before stepping onto the TSA scanning platform.

Shoes have been an issue at the airport for more than two decades. In December 2001, Richard Reed attempted to blow up an American Airlines plane with homemade bombs Hidden in his shoe. He was subdued after struggling to light the fuse. No one was hurt, but in 2006, the TSA began requiring passengers to light the fuse. Remove their shoes While passing through security

Brian Lewis of the Department of Homeland Security told Curry that if the new shoe technology is deployed at airports, checkpoint officers themselves will not actually review the images.

Read more: Nike’s prototype shoes compress and warm our weary feet at CES 2025. Here’s what it feels like

“Everything will be run through an automated detection algorithm,” Lewis said. “So the officer will get a red light or a green light, basically saying, ‘Are the shoes OK, or do we need to do a further inspection?’

The machines look for a variety of things, including shoes that have been tampered with, properties of specific materials and other issues, Lewis said.

This technology transfers the image in slices, essentially building up the image of the shoe on the computer screen, layer by layer. One of the test shoes had a metal letter “F” hidden inside, and Lewis showed Carrie how the metal letter slowly materialized as slices of the image accumulated. The scan takes only about 1 second, and the image is displayed almost instantly.

Detecting gummy worms takes some work

Carey’s shoes appeared strangely full of items at the scan, as expected. Louis was able to point out the spice jar and the outline of the plastic knife.

“I’m not sure I’m seeing the gummy worm, so we may need to do some additional development to be able to detect it effectively,” he said.

When the machine re-scanned her shoes without the items, she was ready to go.

“As we move towards trying to achieve a more seamless travel experience, we know that the thing that the traveling public wants is no longer having to take their shoes off,” Lewis said. “So bringing this technology to passengers is something we think they’ll be really excited about.”

The scanner is still a prototype, and data from the CES demo will be collected and used for further development.

For more CEScheck out The best TVs we’ve seen and Most innovative things you can order right now.