[EvilTerran]

Not really, no. AIUI, the whole point of having a hardware security module is that it only leaves a very narrow attack surface (ie, the protocol for communicating with the device) for malicious software to try to exfiltrate the sensitive data through, with no way to get around it - so if that interface is sufficiently hardened, you should be secure regardless of any weaknesses elsewhere in the system.

In contrast, while you could think of, say, an ssh key agent as a sort of "software security module", such things are inherently vulnerable to low-level attacks that side-step the intended interface. Say, a kernel exploit that grabs the decrypted key straight from the agent's memory.

So if you need to keep your secrets safe even if you unwittingly use them on a comprised OS, you can only pull that off with a hardware module.