Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) require some mechanism to authenticate messages, identify valid vehicles, and remove misbehaving ones. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can provide this functionality using digital certificates. In PKI, key management and corresponding issuance and revocation of digital certificates is one of the key issues that have to be solved. The IEEE 1609.2 standard states that VANETs will rely on the use of certificate revocation lists (CRLs) to achieve revocation. In this paper, we analyze the problems of using CRLs in these type of networks. Moreover, we describe the Risk Aware Revocation (RAR) mechanism that improves the traditional use of CRLs. RAR takes advantage of the two distinct channel types in VANETs to increase the freshness of the revocation information. Moreover, RAR allows users to gauge the risk of operating in a VANET when using CRLs. © 2012 IEEE.