A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is combined with number of versatile nodes that can communicate with one another without having any predefined foundation. These versatile nodes in the MANET go about as routers to transfer the information from source to destination. Since there is an expansion in number of portable clients and its applications, the versatile nodes security assumes a significant job in it. Even there are many methods for providing security to MANET, there are still several attacks causing in MANET. Secure data transfer in MANET can be achieved by introducing strong cryptographic methods and key exchange techniques. The reason for key generation and key maintenance is to give secure techniques for avoiding malicious activities in the MANET and to increase system performance. In this paper a strong cryptographic method is proposed, which generates and maintains keys and distribute keys safely to trusted nodes avoiding malicious nodes. The proposed method detects the malicious nodes and avoids them to participate in communication to improve packet delivery rate and to reduce delay in the network. The proposed method considers a node as a MANET Key Calculator (MKC) which generates keys and selects another node as MANET Key Distributer (MKD) for providing secure data transfer in MANET by applying cryptography methods. The proposed method is compared with traditional methods and the results show that the proposed method is exhibiting better performance.