Sensor nodes once deployed onto the field are mostly provided with little or no attention making them prone to physical attacks by adversaries. Various security frameworks have been proposed to mitigate tampering; others also ensure authentication of sensor nodes. Energy is a limited resource and as such, the need to develop energy efficient frameworks that ensure authentication and thwart tampering of deployed sensor nodes. In this study, a framework comprising an authentication algorithm with a hardware‐based tamper detection and recovery procedure is proposed. An interrupt‐driven tamper detection and recovery mechanism is employed to aid the isolation of compromised nodes. MD‐5, SHA‐1, SHA‐224, SHA‐256, SHA‐384 and SHA‐512 hash functions were reviewed and simulation done to select the most energy‐efficient option (SHA‐224) for use with the authentication algorithm. The proposed framework was compared with other existing authentication frameworks in the area of energy efficiency. The result show that the proposed framework is the most energy‐efficient. The proposed framework, TinySec, SenSec and MiniSec were analysed against node subversion and false node attacks; the proposed framework can detect compromised nodes in all two attacks but the rest were only potent against false nodes and not against node subversion.