Hi Forum Buddies!

I need your help once again. I have a Company intranet that I am creating. I have been asked to create a subweb with very confidential information which would need to be password protected so that only certain persons will be allowed in. How do I start that? I already looked at setting up permissions but that is not what I am looking for. I saw on one of the websites that I frequent, where when you need to go to a secured place, a dialog box comes up and asks for a username and password before allowing the page to view. Also, I do not want the users to be able to self registrate. Any ideas out there?