Physical-layer authentication (PLA) in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) has primarily been studied from a security perspective, while its system-level integration with communication remains less explored. We propose the secure adaptive framework for authentication in multi-zone networks (SAFA-MZ), a system-level formulation for the joint management of collaborative group-tag and private-data delivery in NTN, where high-altitude platform station (HAPS) placement, user association, and transmission powers are jointly selected under service and secrecy constraints. Group-level authentication tags and user data are collaboratively transmitted by multiple HAPSs, with artificial noise (AN) mitigating information leakage. We jointly optimize HAPS placement, user association, and power allocation to balance deployment regularity, tag distribution, and user-rate fairness under secrecy, quality-of-service (QoS), power, and coverage constraints. The problem is addressed using a repair-based cross-entropy method (RCEM) and a graph-aware advantage actor-critic (A2C) algorithm (GA2C). Under colluding and non-colluding eavesdropper models, GA2C improves average secrecy spectral efficiency (SSE) by 135--139% over its single-connect baseline and 21.1--23.2% over its baseline without AN. Across ten independent random seeds, GA2C achieves approximately 23.4% and 17.9% higher mean per-user SSE under non-colluding and colluding eavesdropping, respectively, and a 16.2\% higher mean private-rate Jain's index than RCEM. These results quantify the gains of multi-node connectivity and AN within the proposed framework under the evaluated assumptions.

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