Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are gaining traction in day to day applications where data has to be gathered in hostile environments using low computing power sensors. As these sensors are deployed in hostile environments, strong authentication mechanisms are essential to guarantee the safety and security of the data being transferred. But, these strong authentication mechanisms are computationally heavy for the low power sensors. So, there is a need for a lightweight and secure authentication protocol for WSNs. Applications of these sensor ranges from healthcare to oil and exploration. The security of the data being gathered and transmitted is of utmost importance as they can correlate to life and death situations in some instances. So, employment of extremely secure schemes is a necessity but all these schemes are computationally very expensive and require powerful hardware. The sensors used in WSN are designed for low power environments, and longevity and hence do not possess these hardware resources to secure the communication. Hardware-level, as well as lightweight operations, have to employ for securing the communication. This procedure also preserves the integrity of data being gathered and transmitted by the sensor through these WSNs. © 2020 IEEE.