[Charter]

Hi. If your OS allows them, you can set .htaccess and .htpasswd files and then pass the username and password via the URL like so: http://user:pass@www.domain.com/protected/dir/

If you want the search to be accessible only for validated users, you could add the sessions code to the PhpDig files to get around passing a username and password via a URL.

If PhpDig hits a site that is protected by sessions, and PhpDig is not a valid user, then it will index the resulting 'You cannot access this page' text rather than the content itself.

When you do a crawl, you may want to set the following so that the session value is not available in the search results, where PHPSESSID is the name of the session variable:
define('PHPDIG_SESSID_REMOVE',true);
define('PHPDIG_SESSID_VAR','PHPSESSID');