A pairwise key-agreement scheme is provided for creating key agreements non-interactively between pairs of nodes disposed in a hierarchy of nodes. The scheme is non-interactive so that any two nodes can agree on a shared secret key without interaction. In addition, the scheme is identity-based so that any given node only needs to know the identity of peer nodes to compute the shared secret key. All of the nodes are arranged in a hierarchy where an intermediate node in the hierarchy can derive the secret keys for each of its children from its own secret key and the identity of the child. Accordingly, the scheme is fully resilient against compromise of any number of leaves in the hierarchy and of a threshold number of nodes in the upper levels of the hierarchy. The scheme is well-suited for environments such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), which are very dynamic, have acute bandwidth-constraints and have many nodes are vulnerable to compromise.