Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) emerges as a promising technology and has chances of very likely to be deployed in the coming years. The security of vehicular networks will be an important way to facilitate road safety. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of effective and efficient distribution of the certificate revocation units (RSUs) in vehicular networks. We propose a novel distributed approach by introducing mobile nodes that have public safety. An optimal route for mobile nodes is designed to cover blind areas under both delay and cost constraints. The performances of the movement‐assisted approach are measured and evaluated by extensive experiments in large scale networks for Certificate Revocation List (CRL) distribution in VANET. The results show that the proposed movement‐assisted approach obviously improves the performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.