Group key management techniques are applied to generating pair-wise keys for point-to-point secure communication applications. Nodes participating in a secure communication group each receive a group key and associated policy information. When a first node wishes to establish a secure point-to-point connection to a second node, the first node derives a pairwise key from the group key and policy information, for example, by hashing the group key and information identifying the two nodes. As a result, a pairwise key is generated without exchanging negotiation messages among the two nodes and without expensive asymmetric cryptographic computation approaches.