Journal of Intelligent Systems and Internet of Things JISIoT 2690-6791 2769-786X 10.54216/JISIoT https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/849 2019 2019 King Faisal University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Abdul Rahaman Wahab Sait Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, Krishnankoil, India M. Ilayaraja Wireless sensor networks (WSN) encompass numerous sensor nodes deployed in the physical environment to sense parameters and transmit to the base station (BS). Since the nodes in WSN communicate via a wireless channel, security remains a significant issue that needs to be resolved. The choice of cluster heads (CHs) is critical to achieving secure data transmission in WSN. In this aspect, this article presents a novel trust-aware mothflame optimization-based secure clustering (TAMFO-SC) technique for WSN. The goal of the TAMFO-SC technique is to determine the trust level of the nodes and determine the secure CHs. The proposed TAMFO-SC technique initially determines the nodes' trust level, and the node with maximum trust factor can be chosen as CHs. In addition, the TAMFO-SC technique derives a fitness function using two parameters, namely residual energy and trust level. The inclusion of trust level in the CH selection process helps to accomplish security in WSN. A comprehensive experimental analysis exhibits the promising performance of the TAMFO-SC technique over the other compared methods.  2019 2019 54 64 10.54216/JISIoT.000202 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/18/show/849