Server 500 error when submitting an unencoded utf-8 password string

[zfi]

Calling the /authentication/local endpoint with a password that is UTF-8 encoded causes an unhandled server failure. The endpoint is expecting a base-64 encoded string but is not reacting well to a UTF-8 encoded password string.

[zfi]

The sha256 hash function requires a byte array in Python3 and we were still providing a string. This triggered the TypeError exception that looked a lot like an encoding issue we see while transporting data on HTTPS.

The fix to this is to rework the parameters to the hash encoding method to provide a byte array instead of a string.