Ecma 376 does not specify password encoding values (Part 4, Section 2.15.1.28). All documents today must be able to support multiple languages through the use of proper Unicode encoding. However, Ecma 376 does not specify the Unicode encoding to be used and therefore is confusing to implementators as the algorithms specified indicate the manipulation of bytes which strictly depends on the encoding.

Ecma 376 should be reviewed to correctly specify Unicode encoding.

Part 4, Section 2.15.1.28

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment MY-0021 (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: 0×61 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 , IR-0013 , PT-0039 , US-0052 , UY-0017 , VE-0018