In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of a cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) considering a single energy harvesting (EH) half-duplex amplify and forward (AF) relay and an eavesdropper (EAV). Power is allocated to each node under cognitive constraints. Because of the absence of a direct wireless link, secondary source (SS) communicates with secondary destination (SD) in two time slots. The SD and the SS broadcast jamming signal to confuse the EAV in the first and in the second time slots, respectively. The relay harvests energy in the first time slot and amplifies and forwards the signal to SD in the second time slot. The EAV employs maximal ratio combining scheme to extract the information. We evaluate the performance in terms of secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the proposed CCRN. The approximate expression of SOP is obtained in integration form. Improvement in SOP is expected for the proposed CCRN because of the use of jamming signals. The secrecy performance of CCRN improves with increase in primary transmit power, peak transmit power of secondary nodes, channel mean power, and energy conversion efficiency but degrades with increase in threshold outage rate of primary receiver and threshold secrecy rate. A MATLAB-based simulation framework has been developed to validate the analytical work. KEYWORDS cooperative cognitive radio network, eavesdropper attacking, energy harvesting amplify and forward relay, MRC scheme, power allocation, secrecy outage probability Int J Commun Syst. 2019;32:e3880.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac