CREST Practitioner Security Analyst (CPSA) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The role of a Name Server (NS) Record is to announce authoritative name servers for a zone. This means that the NS record specifies which DNS servers are responsible for that particular domain or zone. When a DNS resolver needs to find information about a domain, it will first look for the NS records to know which servers to contact for further queries.

NS records are essential for the functioning of the Domain Name System (DNS) because they help to direct traffic appropriately and ensure that queries for domain names are resolved to the correct IP addresses by identifying the correct authoritative name servers. This supports the distributed nature of DNS, where different zones can be managed by different name servers.

The other choices do not accurately describe the function of an NS record. For instance, specifying a server's hardware configuration pertains more closely to server management rather than DNS records. Storing user access permissions is typically associated with access control lists (ACLs) rather than DNS records. Caching results from DNS queries is the role of a DNS resolver or caching server, rather than an NS record. Thus, the function of announcing authoritative name servers is what distinguishes B as the correct answer.