There is not information about the encoding of passwords in the specification in this section. Although, it is most likely supposed to be Unicode encoding, but no details are available about this so for example the byte ordering is not defined.

The exact encoding detail and byte ordering should be available for entering the password and calculating the hash.

Part 4, Section 2.15.1.28

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment IR-0013 (Modified: 2008-01-03) Agreed; the following changes will be made to make this assumption explicit in each algorithm: Part 4, §2.15.1.28, page 1,158, line 15: First, the UTF-16 encoded password shall be hashed using the following algorithm . The following steps assume that all words are unsigned, the word size is two bytes, and that bit-level SHL/SHR operations shift in the direction of the highest-order and lowest-order bit, respectively. [Example: 0x61 SHR 1 is 0xC2, as 01100001 shifted one position in the direction of its highest-order bit is 11000010. end example] : Similar Comments: BR-0006 , CL-0091 , CO-0098 , CZ-0053 , DE-0088 , GB-0220 , GH-0009 , GR-0027 , IN-0075 , MY-0021 , PT-0039 , US-0052 , UY-0017 , VE-0018