Disclaimer: I have worked in the past for one of the major HSM vendors, but things can be changed in the last years. To authenticate an application, you should

Disclaimer: I have worked in the past for one of the major HSM vendors, but things can be changed in the last years. To authenticate an application, you should generate a client certificate and share to the application, in order to create a mutual authentication trust. When you request some operations to HSM you need to authenticate yourself with the certificate. Of course the certificate must be kept as a secret and not shared with anybody. There is also a sort of RBAC scheme related to client certificate.