Checking if its a secure page

Hi,

We are in the process of developing our website and one of the items that we are going to have to tackle is securing a page based off of a set of credentials. Does anyone know a way, a plugin, something that would help us do this. We are not using the wordpress users for this, we are using a separate working database it will be speaking too. We also don’t want to have it check if its a secure page EVERYTIME. Just wondering if there is something out there that gives the page an attribute that flags it as a secure page….