Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a pivotal role in diverse applications such as environmental monitoring, industrial automation, healthcare, and smart cities. The motivation behind the development of WSNs stems from their impact in providing real-time data on various environmental parameters. The challenge for WSNs is to achieve strong security and efficient energy saving together. Traditional methods sought to find solutions either through security or energy. In response, this study proposed a secure and energy-efficient framework for enhancing security measures in WSNs while minimizing the impact on energy resources by using the Enhanced Consumed Energy Leach (ECP-LEACH) protocol and the Enhanced Random Forest Classifier for Low Execution Time (ERF-LET) algorithm for attack detection named Security-Enhanced Energy Conservation with ERF-LET (S-2EC-ERF). The integration of the detection algorithm at the node level played a pivotal role in fortifying the security posture of individual nodes by detecting and mitigating potential security threats. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset obtained from NS3 simulations, the ERF-LET algorithm demonstrated its proficiency in differentiating between normal and attack packets, thereby laying a strong foundation for subsequent evaluations, where it achieved an accuracy of 98.193%. The proposed methodology was further validated through real-time simulations conducted on the NS3. The results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed S-2EC-ERF in terms of the packet delivery ratio (PDR), average throughput, end-to-end delay, and mean energy consumption compared to the Security-Enhanced Energy Conservation with Logistic Regression (S-2EC-LR), Security-Enhanced Energy Conservation with Decision Tree (S-2EC-DT), and Security-Enhanced Energy Conservation with AdaBoost (S-2EC-Ada) algorithms.
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