  It is known that a keV scale sterile neutrino is a good warm dark matter
candidate. We study how this possibility could be realized in the context of
gauge extensions of the standard model. The na\"ive expectation leads to large
thermal overproduction of sterile neutrinos in this setup. However, we find
that it is possible to use out-of-equilibrium decay of the other right-handed
neutrinos of the model to dilute the present density of the keV sterile
neutrinos and achieve the observed dark matter density. We present the
universal requirements that should be satisfied by the gauge extensions of the
standard model, containing right-handed neutrinos, to be viable models of warm
dark matter, and provide a simple example in the context of the left-right
symmetric model.
