Please see below answer from Bikas : https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/46500/spark-cant-connect-to-hbase-using-kerberos-in-clus.html Apache Spark 2.0 has support for automatically acquiring HBase security tokens correctly for that job and all its executors. Apache Spark 1.6 does not have that feature but in HDP Spark 1.6 we have backported that feature and it can acquire the HBase tokens for the jobs. The tokens are automatically acquired if 1) security is enabled and 2) hbase-site.xml is present on the client classpath 3) that hbase-site.xml has kerberos security configured. Then hbase tokens for the hbase master specified in that hbase-site.xml are acquired and used in the job. ... View more