The objective of ensuring anytime and anywhere networking services for collaborative and group-oriented applications can be realised with the concept of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) due to its certain inherent characteristics such as self-organizing, infrastructure-less setup, and little or no requirement of planning and ease of deployment. On the other hand, some other inherent characteristics of MANETs such as dynamic topology, limited resource constraints, open wireless medium for communication, lack of central administration, multi hop communication, etc. demands some emphasis about security for group communication. Also internal as well as external security attacks are possible. To tackle this issue significant research has been carried out in recent years but most of the schemes use the cryptographic keying material. So the key management takes place a vital starring role. An efficient scalable and secure group key management framework for MANETs is an ongoing hot research area. The purpose of this paper is to give the survey about group key management goals, state of the art frameworks, discuss their pros and cons, and also future challenges for young research community in the context of MANETs. © 2016, International Journal of Pharmacy and Technology. All rights reserved.