Secure key protocol is important to protect the sensitive information of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Energy consumption must be considered in designing key protocol owing to resource constraints on networks. We present an novel efficient key pre-distribution protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (EKPPH), EKPPH is realized by utilizing LU matrix polynomial and hash function. Compared to existing protocols, our main contributions are that network secure resiliency is improved without increasing overhead. In addition, the memory consumption of entire network increases slowly regardless of network's size increasing rapidly, so the EKPPH is more suitable for large-scale wireless sensor networks. © 2013 by Binary Information Press.