Widespread utilization of mobile ad hoc networks, which communicate via broadcast wireless channels without any sort of infrastructure, raises security concerns. Introduction of identity-based cryptography shed some light to security problems of mobile ad hoc networks. Key management (KM) plays significant role in network security. Although many proposals are suggested for identity-based KM, they usually assume a trusted set of nodes during network initialization, which is not the case in many real-world applications. In this paper, a novel identity-based KM method is proposed, which utilizes Pedersen's verifiable secret sharing method. By distributing shared secret and key generation role among network nodes, the proposed method provides high levels of availability and scalability, while eliminating single point of failure. The proposed method provides a mechanism to check the validity of secret shares, which are generated by network nodes. To illustrate the effectiveness and capabilities of the proposed methods, they are simulated and compared with the performance of the existing methods. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.