sbt-assembly is setup to pick the first META-INF/services/org.apache.hadoop.security.SecurityInfo file instead of merging them. This causes Kerberos authentication to fail, this manifests itself in the "info:null" debug log statement:

    DEBUG SaslRpcClient: Get token info proto:interface org.apache.hadoop.yarn.api.ApplicationClientProtocolPB info:null
    DEBUG SaslRpcClient: Get kerberos info proto:interface org.apache.hadoop.yarn.api.ApplicationClientProtocolPB info:null
    ERROR UserGroupInformation: PriviledgedActionException as:foo@BAR (auth:KERBEROS) cause:org.apache.hadoop.security.AccessControlException: Client cannot authenticate via:[TOKEN, KERBEROS]
    DEBUG UserGroupInformation: PrivilegedAction as:foo@BAR (auth:KERBEROS) from:org.apache.hadoop.ipc.Client$Connection.handleSaslConnectionFailure(Client.java:583)
    WARN Client: Exception encountered while connecting to the server : org.apache.hadoop.security.AccessControlException: Client cannot authenticate via:[TOKEN, KERBEROS]
    ERROR UserGroupInformation: PriviledgedActionException as:foo@BAR (auth:KERBEROS) cause:java.io.IOException: org.apache.hadoop.security.AccessControlException: Client cannot authenticate via:[TOKEN, KERBEROS]

This previously would just contain a single class:

$ unzip -c assembly/target/scala-2.10/spark-assembly-0.9.0-incubating-SNAPSHOT-hadoop2.2.0.jar META-INF/services/org.apache.hadoop.security.SecurityInfo
Archive:  assembly/target/scala-2.10/spark-assembly-0.9.0-incubating-SNAPSHOT-hadoop2.2.0.jar
  inflating: META-INF/services/org.apache.hadoop.security.SecurityInfo

    org.apache.hadoop.security.AnnotatedSecurityInfo

And now has the full list of classes:

$ unzip -c assembly/target/scala-2.10/spark-assembly-0.9.0-incubating-SNAPSHOT-hadoop2.2.0.jar META-INF/services/org.apache.hadoop.security.SecurityInfoArchive:  assembly/target/scala-2.10/spark-assembly-0.9.0-incubating-SNAPSHOT-hadoop2.2.0.jar
  inflating: META-INF/services/org.apache.hadoop.security.SecurityInfo

    org.apache.hadoop.security.AnnotatedSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.v2.app.MRClientSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.v2.security.client.ClientHSSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.yarn.security.client.ClientRMSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.yarn.security.ContainerManagerSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.yarn.security.SchedulerSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.yarn.security.admin.AdminSecurityInfo
    org.apache.hadoop.yarn.server.RMNMSecurityInfoClass