Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as potential technology for their applications in battlefields, infrastructure building, traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring, health, and smart homes. Unattended nature of these networks makes them vulnerable to variety of attacks, the inherent stringent resources makes conventional security measure infeasible. An attacker can capture a sensor node to install number of clone nodes with same privacy information causing serious security threats and deterioration in network lifetime. Current, security scheme along with distinct advantages suffer from number of limitations. A good counter attacks measure should not only cater for security and energy-efficiency but network lifetime as well. In this paper, we propose a next-node selection method which consider residual energy and clone attacks ratio in addition to distance, in order to overcome the limitation of fixed path based shortest routing. These factors are also considered while selecting the witness header in WSNs. Results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed schemes in terms of network lifetime.