As the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs increase, the issue of security and efficient authentication of these networks is one of the burning questions. The classical authentication systems are either more prone to the use of centralized systems or computationally-intensive cryptographic systems which is not suitable in large scale and resource-constrained systems. The current key distribution schemes also have the problems of poor scalability, probabilistic connectivity along with sensitive to attacks such as node capture and man in the middle attacks. In this paper, a novel authentication framework is suggested as a framework that is based on combinatorial key distribution to provide deterministic, scalable and lightweight security. The aim is to come up with some practical authentication mechanism that can partially guarantee the credible exchanges of keys and reduce the cost of computation and storage. The algorithm employs combinatorial designs like Balanced Incomplete Block Designs (BIBDs) to compute structured key pools, and deterministic key rings to nodes. A key based authentication protocol that uses a shared key and a nonce based verification that uses mutual authentication is developed using a lightweight protocol and a secure session key is generated. The performance of the scheme measured on the basis of measures like the authentication success rate, cost of computation and storage overhead and connectivity demonstrate that the proposed scheme has an authentication success rate of more than 95 percent and low (1218 ms) computation time and sensible (812 KB) storage overhead.