The Wireless Sensor Networks are nowadays much in the usage. They have small tiny sensor nodes which are having limited energy for sensing the data from surrounding and send it to the base station. The energy can be saved by modifying the routing protocols, especially hierarchical routing called cluster based routing protocol can be modified for achieving more network lifetime. Energy efficient cluster-based routing protocol LEACH is having limitations like energy efficiency and security. These limitations are studied and modified for improvements and simulated in NS2 by mainly changing the cluster head selection process and key management for saving energy and adding security. From the results it is concluded that instead of probabilistic approach (as used by LEACH) to select cluster head selection; if the selection is based on vicinity added with residual energy of the node then the performance of this modified LEACH is improved significantly compared to LEACH variants for consumed energy/residual energy, the lifetime of the network is increased, and the network supports more number of data packet transmission.