Secure multimedia multicast applications involve group communications where group membership requires secured dynamic key generation and updating operations. Such operations usually consume high computation time and therefore designing a key distribution protocol with reduced computation time is necessary for multicast applications. In this paper, we propose a new key distribution protocol that focuses on two aspects. The first one aims at the reduction of computation complexity by performing lesser numbers of multiplication operations using a ternary-tree approach during key updating. Moreover, it aims to optimize the number of multiplication operations by using the existing Karatsuba divide and conquer approach for fast multiplication. The second aspect aims at reducing the amount of information communicated to the group members during the update operations in the key content. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated based on computation and communication complexity and a comparative performance analysis of various key distribution protocols is provided. Moreover, it has been observed that the proposed algorithm reduces the computation and communication time significantly. © 2013 KSII.