Masking Column at column level?

Hello Gurus,  

I have had one of our Developers tell me that he wants me to enable "Oracle's password masking at column level".

My answer was Huh?

Do any of you know of such a thing? Specifically for Oracle 8.1.7.4.1 on Windows 2K.

I have been reading up in the fine docs but I don't find any reference to such ability.

Should there not be such a thing, as I suspect there isn't, what could I suggest they use?  

TIA Denham

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