Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are novel large-scale wireless networks that consist of distributed, self organizing, low-power, low-cost, tiny sensor devices to cooperatively collect information through infrastructure less wireless networks. These networks are envisioned to play a crucial role in variety of applications like critical military surveillance applications, forest fire monitoring, commercial applications such as building security monitoring, traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes and many more scenarios. Node capture attack is one of the most dreadful security attack exist in wireless sensor networks. An adversary steals cryptographic key or other confidential information like node’s id etc from a captured node to compromise entire network. So, Security of wireless sensor network is an important issue for maintaining confidentiality and integrity of wireless links. Now-a-days, researchers are paying attention towards developing security schemes against Node capture attack. Our survey provides deep insights of existing techniques that enhance the attacking efficiency of the node capture attack in wireless sensor network. It also analyzes various detection and key pre-distribution schemes for inventing a new scheme to improve resilience against node capture attack.