It appears that there can be a lot of different causes for this issue. I experienced it after installing a new version of Eclipse (Luna). Command-line maven worked fine, but Eclipse had build issues.
I use a Certificate Authority in my JRE. This is important because this provides my authentication when downloading Maven resources. Even though my project was pointing to the appropriate JRE inside of Eclipse - Eclipse was running using a different JRE (this is apparent looking at the Java process properties in Windows task manager). My solution was to add the following in my eclipse.ini and explicitly define the JRE I want to use.
-vm
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\bin\javaw.exe