Designing a centralised group key management with minimal computation complexity to support dynamic secure multicast communication is a challenging issue in secure multimedia multicast. In this study, the authors propose a Chinese remainder theorem-based group key management scheme that drastically reduces computation complexity of the key server. The computation complexity of key server is reduced to O(1) in this proposed algorithm. Moreover, the computation complexity of group member is also minimised by performing one modulo division operation when a user join or leave operation is performed in a multicast group. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested using a key-star-based key management scheme and has been observed that this proposed algorithm reduces the computation complexity significantly. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014.