Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) is increasingly applied in sensing and monitoring scenarios, but a large number of sensor nodes usually face high security risks. Having limited resources and weak security protection, sensor nodes are vulnerable to malicious attacks such as selective forwarding, forgery and tampering of data in collecting data, resulting in unnecessary damage to the system. A trust mechanism based secure cluster head election algorithm is thus proposed for wireless sensor networks. Considering the historical communication records, data consistency, the distance between nodes in the cluster and the distance between base stations, as well as the communication quality and energy consumption, the safe and reliable cluster heads are elected as the aggregation node of the current cluster. At the same time, the fairness of energy consumption of selected cluster head nodes is guaranteed by time cycle rotation. Finally, the simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively avoid the malicious nodes being selected as cluster heads and improve the security of wireless sensor networks.