What are the .android folders and adbkey files on my computer?

Question

Today I discovered a folder in my home directory with the name .android.

Inside the folder are just two files, adbkey and adbkey.pub.

I have searched around and have found out that adbkey.pub is a Windows trojan. The files were last modified in January, but were just accessed a few hours ago. I have never used an Android device or Android SDK on my computer.

I have WINE installed on my computer. I also ran a ClamAV scan on the folder and it didn't detect anything.

Any ideas what this is and if I should be concerned?

Solution

If your computer has never had an Android device connected, then I don't know where those files came from.

On my computer (as I use both Android and its SDK) those files are an SSH key-pair that allow me to mark my computer as "trusted" to my phone.

SSH keys shouldn't be harmful.

If you want to verify that these are SSH keys, open ".android" in the file browser (Nautilus), right-click on "adbkey", and select Properties. The file's Type should be "PKCS#8 Personal Key in PEM format (application/pkcs8+pem)" and its Size exactly 1,704B. "adbkey.pub" should be a little over 700B.

("adbkey.pub" is unhelpfully described as a Microsoft Publisher file: I put this down to Nautilus making a guess from the extension; equally unhelpfully, the file command describes them both as "ASCII text".)

I can attach a sample copy of each file, if you want to confirm yours have the correct format.

Comments

[Admin]

I bet you can not get rid of it with reformatting your hard drive !! I also have the same problem. It has been 3 years but still no answer for this.

[Admin]

See my comment on @A F Ball's answer below, for me the files were benign and simply part of Firefox's Android Debug Bridge (adb). I was just in a panic when I originally posted this, adbkey and adbkey.pub were just private/public keys.

[jamieweb]

The files in my case turned out to be part of Android Debug Bridge in Firefox.