Abstract: Group communication is crucial in today’s contemporary world. Secure exchange of group key is essential to have secure group communication. Group key exchange in MANET is a great challenge and is the focus here. In this study, secure sroup key distribution in MANET based on identity based broadcast encryption is proposed. The group key can be generated by having minimal interaction among the group members. This reduces the computational time for group key generation. Only one bilinear pairing is required during key exchange which reduces the execution time. Authentication of the user is ensured before transferring the key. Forward and backward secrecy is guaranteed. The communication overhead remains minimal as the group size increases. This scheme is secure and more beneficial due to optimal time complexity.