The rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the significant incentive to contribute in the vulnerable applications such as cognitive radio (CR). This paper proposes a Stackelberg game approach to enhance the WSN-based CR security against the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack and conserve the consequent lost power consumption. The attack aims to corrupt the spectrum decision by imposing interference power to the delivered reports from the sensor nodes (SNs) to the fusion center (FC) to make a protection level below a specific threshold. The proposed model utilizes the intelligent Stackelberg game features along with the matched filter (MF) to maximize the number of protected reports sent by the SNs to the FC leading to accurate decision of the spectrum status. Furthermore, the TDMA protocol is utilized to resolve the complexity of employing MF for the spectrum detection to avoid the collision between the delivered reports. The proposed model aims to enhance the number of correctly received reports at the FC, and hence manage the lost energy of reports retransmission due to the malicious attack effect. Moreover, the model can conserve the lost power of the failure communication attempts due to the SSDF attack impact. Simulation results indicate the improved performance of the proposed protection model along with the MF over the six different environments against the SSDF attack as compared to two defense schemes, namely, random and equal weight defense strategies.In this regard, secured WSNs can dramatically contribute in CR networks (CRNs) as the fusion center (FC) needs to rely on distributed sensor nodes (SNs) to sense the spectrum status. In other words, WSNs suffer from security and power management problems specially in harsh environments. The uncontrolled WSNs security is a double defect: one is data deterioration and second is losing power consumption in transmission of designated infected data. Consequently, security in WSNs-based CR is a prominent issue that has been considered in [8,[17][18][19][20][21].One of the eminent techniques utilized in the literature to handle the security problem in WSNs is game theory [22][23][24][25][26]. Game theory is a special optimization branch which tackles the interaction among a set of rational intelligent users that aim to enhance their individual gains in an intelligent and adaptive way [27]. To this end, three main dependent challenges affecting a smooth operation for CR are spectrum sensing, mitigating security threats, and the consequent lost energy. One of the security threats in CRNs is spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack [28]. Here, the defender represents the FC. Therefore, the whole communication system in such CRN can be strictly disrupted and the network performance will be steeply degraded. In addition, this attack can disrupt the delivered reports at the FC, and hence, a wrong decision will be taken by the FC about the spectrum status. Moreover, it does not only reduce the number of correctly received reports...