This paper addresses the problem of secure path key establishment in wireless sensor networks that uses the random key pre-distribution technique. Inspired by the recent proxybased scheme in [1] and [2], we introduce a friend-based scheme for establishing pairwise keys securely. We show that the chances of finding friends in a neighbourhood are considerably more than that of finding proxies, leading to lower communication overhead. Further, we prove that the friend-based scheme performs better than the proxy-based scheme both in terms of resilience against node capture as well as in energy consumption for pairwise key establishment, making our scheme more feasible.