International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 10, No. 4, August 2020, pp. 4296~4304 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v10i4.pp4296-4304  4296 Journal homepage: http://ijece.iaescore.com/index.php/IJECE Multi-stage secure clusterhead selection using discrete rule-set against unknown attacks in wireless sensor network Tejashwini N. 1 , D. R. Shashi Kumar 2 , K. Satyanarayana Reddy 3 1 Visvesvaraya Technological University, India 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Cambridge Institute of Technology, India 3 Department of Information Science and Engineering, Cambridge Institute of Technology, India Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Jul 5, 2018 Revised Feb 3, 2020 Accepted Feb 26, 2020 Security is the rising concern of the wireless network as there are various forms of reonfigurable network that is arised from it. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is one such example that is found to be an integral part of cyber-physical system in upcoming times. After reviewing the existing system, it can be seen that there are less dominant and robust solutions towards mitigating the threats of upcoming applications of WSN. Therefore, this paper introduces a simple and cost-effective modelling of a security system that offers security by ensuring secure selection of clusterhead during the data aggregation process in WSN. The proposed system also makes construct a rule-set in order to learn the nature of the communication iin order to have a discrete knowledge about the intensity of adversaries. With an aid of simulation-based approach over MEMSIC nodes, the proposed system was proven to offer reduced energy consumption with good data delivery performance in contrast to existing approach. Keywords: Cryptography Encryption Energy Security Wireless sensor network Copyright © 2020 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: Tejashwini N., Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi, Karnataka, India. Email: tejashwini.n@gmail.com 1. INTRODUCTION The usage of wireless network has almost substituted majority of the legacy wired product in past decade. Although, there are significant advance of the wireless networks, there are potential challenges too [1]. There is various research works towards investigating the solutions for identifying the challenges in different forms of wireless network e.g. wireless local area network (WLAN) [2, 3], wireless sensor network (WSN) [4, 5], mobile adhoc network (MANET) [6, 7], etc. Out of all forms of wireless network, WSN has got a significant future as it is an integral part of Internet-of-Things (IoT) as well as any cyber-physical system [6]. There are wide ranges of application supported by WSN that has significantly found its way to the commercial products. However, security factor is becoming a rising concern because of various reasons. The first reason of security concern about WSN is that it cannot execute typical cryptographic programs as it doesn’t have adequate resources to execute complex cryptographic programs [8]. A complex cryptographic algorithm e.g. RSA (Rivest Shamir Algorithm) is a strongest encryption technique; however, size of the key for RSA is too large to be consistently used in a resource constraint sensors. The second reason of security concern is that majority of the existing security approaches are only meant for addressing specific form of attacks. This increases the development cost and reduces its applicability as malicious program can change at any point of time. Hence, the applicability of the security solution diminishes in this regard. The third reason of security concern is that it is not feasible for identifying the attacks generated from cross-platform networks. This usually happens when two different networking technologies are connected together e.g. IoT is formed by the integration of sensors and cloud. Where it is one of the most challenging tasks to identify