Change:
appropriate.  This alert SHOULD be followed by a "close_notify". This alert is generally a warning. <del> Either party MAY initiate a close by sending a "close_notify" alert. Any data received after a closure alert MUST be ignored.  If a transport-level close is received prior to a "close_notify", the receiver cannot know that all the data that was sent has been received. Each party MUST send a "close_notify" alert before closing the write side of the connection, unless some other fatal alert has been transmitted.  The other party MUST respond with a "close_notify" alert of its own and close down the connection immediately, discarding any pending writes.  The initiator of the close need not wait for the responding "close_notify" alert before closing the read side of the connection. </del> <ins> Either party MAY initiate a close of its write side of the connection by sending a "close_notify" alert.  Any data received after a closure alert has been received MUST be ignored.  If a transport-level close is received prior to a "close_notify", the receiver cannot know that all the data that was sent has been received. Each party MUST send a "close_notify" alert before closing its write side of the connection, unless it has already sent some other fatal alert.  This does not have any effect on its read side of the connection.  Note that this is a change from versions of TLS prior to TLS 1.3 in which implementations were required to react to a "close_notify" by discarding pending writes and sending an immediate "close_notify" alert of their own.  That previous requirement could cause truncation in the read side.  Both parties need not wait to receive a "close_notify" alert before closing their read side of the connection. </ins> If the application protocol using TLS provides that any data may be carried over the underlying transport after the TLS connection is <del> closed, the TLS implementation MUST receive the responding "close_notify" alert before indicating to the application layer that the TLS connection has ended.  If the application protocol will not transfer any additional data but will only close the underlying transport connection, then the implementation MAY choose to close the transport without waiting for the responding "close_notify".  No part of this standard should be taken to dictate the manner in which a usage profile for TLS manages its data transport, including when </del> <ins> closed, the TLS implementation MUST receive a "close_notify" alert before indicating end-of-data to the application-layer.  No part of this standard should be taken to dictate the manner in which a usage profile for TLS manages its data transport, including when </ins> connections are opened or closed. <del> Note: It is assumed that closing a connection reliably delivers pending data before destroying the transport. </del> <ins> Note: It is assumed that closing the write side of a connection reliably delivers pending data before destroying the transport. </ins> 6.2.

Discussion:
Currently TLS 1.3 specifies closenotify in the same way that TLS 1.2 did. I believe that has issues and this might be the right time to fix them. The purpose of closenotify is to protect against data truncation attacks, each side is required to send closenotify before closing the write side of the transport connection so the other side knows that the data was not truncated. As such, closenotify only needs half-close semantics to prevent truncation. However, the specification contains the following text: > This means that an application-layer client can't send a query then close their write transport when they know that they're done, because the server would terminate the TLS session before sending the reply. On top of this, when the server receives the closenotify, it may have already sent part of the reply (or wrote it to the socket send buffer) so the responding closenotify would in effect be inflicting a truncation attack on the client. This doesn't make much difference for HTTP because clients already don't close their write transport after sending a reply, however having the option do do this could allow innovation in new protocols that can define the semantics of when they use closenotify. An example is DNS PUSH: URL A proposal to solve this problem would be to give closenotify half-close semantics: we keep the requirements that a closenotify be sent before closing the transport, and that any data received after a closenotify is ignored, but we simply remove the requirement to immediately reply with a close_notify. This has the advantage that current implementations are already compliant but future ones can leverage this improvement.