Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a kind of multihop and self-organizing networks formed by the way of wireless communication and composed by a large number of lowcost microsensor nodes deployed in the monitoring area. The sensor nodes cooperate to perceive and acquire the process and transmit the perceived object information in the network covering within the geographical area and finally send the information to the sink. In the recent decade, with the rapid development of various kinds of key technology in WSNs, they are widely applied to many especial environments, such as, military defense, environment detection, biological health, and disaster-relief work. Due to the limited computing ability, battery capacity, and storage capacity of sensor nodes, energy-efficient data collection became a nonnegligible research issue in WSNs. Also the open architecture in receiving data and transmitting data of WSNs is vulnerable to various security attacks during the data collection process. These two fundamental issues motivate us to have this special issue addressing the recent advances which are mentioned in Table 1 on security and energy-efficient data collection in WSNs.In response to this call for papers, we have received a total of 36 high-quality submissions, and 13 papers have been selected for publication after a rigorous review process due to the space limit. The papers in this special issue are divided into three thematic groups as follows.The first set of the seven papers emphasizes the security technology with a series of key agreement protocol, encryption, authentication, and trust scheme to solve the special security issues. According to the current researches in security technology in Table 1, the seven papers are significant for the improvement of the security of the network. "A hybrid authenticated group key agreement protocol in wireless sensor networks" by Y. Li et al. proposed an AGKA protocol which reduced the high cost public-key operations at the sensor side and replaced them with efficient symmetric-key based operations. In "Efficient and secure routing protocol based on encryption and authentication for wireless sensor networks" by J. Zhou, the author aimed to perform a secure routing protocol based on encryption and authentication which encrypted all communication packets and authenticated the source nodes and the BS.