Newsgroup Discussion Variable Size Block Ciphers discussed in sci.crypt. It is necessary that good diffusion be produced from all plaintext input bits to all ciphertext output bits. It is desirable that a fixed number of processing layers evenly diffuse blocks of any size, or else there would be a strong motive to use small blocks. The original announcement.
WAKE is an autokey stream cipher.
In a stream cipher, diffusion can occur only to that part of the stream following a particular datum. Ralf's previous message. Also detailed questions and comments. Currently, I am less interested in strength than overall diffusion. Ralf's other previous message.