I recently took over for someone who left my company and so I don't know much about how they did that they did but here is what i see:
We have a portal with a 3 tier drop-down navigation (can't use the ootb navigation)
This navigation is receiving the node info from a .sitemap file located in our /14 hive.
From my understanding (and I may be wrong) is that in the master page the navigation tiers and what type of provider is defined. The web.config file makes the connection between the masterpage and the .sitemap file.
My task now is to apply permissions to these navigation items (some users see the full menu and others see part of it). I don't see any part of the process that I explained above where I could stick permissions in. I have also been suggested that a list driven navigation might be able to help but I don't know much about that.
This is a SharePoint 2010 environment
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all for your time.