PS4 vs PS5 executables: the SELF container is the same format (measured)

[Dextroid17]

boykopovar asked on #207 whether the executable file format differs between PS4 and PS5. I have four retail eboots on hand and parsed their SELF headers directly, so here is the measurement rather than an opinion.

All four are unencrypted signed SELF containers holding x86-64 ELF, and all four use identical structure.

dump	container	header size	segments	segment 0 flags	any ENCR
PPSA26344	PS4 SELF	0x560	12	0x00110004	no
PPSA03671	PS5 SELF	0x560	12	0x00110004	no
PPSA28997	PS4 SELF	0x560	12	0x00110004	no
PPSA35169	PS4 SELF	0x560	12	0x00110004	no

Identical across PS4 and PS5

• header layout: key_type u32 at 0x8, header_size u16 at 0xC, file_size u64 at 0x10, num_entries u16 at 0x18
• segment table: 0x20 bytes per entry as {flags:u64, offset:u64, encrypted_compressed_size:u64, decrypted_decompressed_size:u64}, starting at 0x20
• segment flag encoding: 0x2 ENCR, 0x4 SIGN, 0x800 BFLG
• the payload: 64-bit x86-64, with the ELF header readable in plaintext at 0x1a0, inside the SELF header

Different

• the magic: PS4 4f 15 3d 1d, PS5 54 14 f5 ee
• the first segment starts at 0xa70 on the PS4 files and 0xb70 on the PS5 one

Two consequences

1. The container is not what separates PS4 from PS5. A format-level unwrapper is agnostic, so what makes PS4 titles unworkable here is the platform interface and graphics API — which is what (Question) Does it support PS4 games? #159 already concluded, and which this measurement shows is not a file-format problem.
2. None of these four is encrypted: the ENCR bit is clear on every segment, and payload entropy is 6.455/8.0 rather than the ~7.99 AES-CBC would give. That speaks only to these four retail dumps. A dump can be encrypted, and parsing a header is not decryption.

Scope caveat: this shows the container is shared. It does not show PS4 titles would run — that is the library surface, a far larger question. If a PS4 dump were accepted by the loader, the work would still be the system libraries, not the file.

Written with AI assistance.