ABSTRACTBy increasing smart objects as high‐potential computing devices and 5G technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerging technology to provide a data‐centric infrastructure for detecting safe device‐to‐device communications by supporting security and privacy issues. As a 5G‐enabled communication technology, vehicle‐to‐vehicle (V2V) communication provides a wireless exchange information connection between smart vehicles, intelligent devices, and a cloud‐edge computing environment. This connection should be established with a safe and secured run‐time protection system to avoid many critical anomalies and misbehavior problems. Detecting run‐time malicious transformations with data‐centric misbehaving reactions is a main challenge for autonomous vehicle communications with 5G‐enabled communication technology. This paper provides a hybrid genetic algorithm‐based ensemble bagged trees (GA‐EBT) algorithm for a data‐centric misbehavior detection approach to support the V2V communications against malicious and misbehavior transactions. In this hybrid algorithm, GA provides a beneficial performance on the training accuracy factor based on a single‐objective fitness function and EBT supports a high‐degree prediction and training process using multiple decision tree models with bootstrapped samples of the training data. For the evaluation of the proposed algorithm, four real test cases are applied for messaging injection attacks in the V2V environments in comparison to the state‐of‐the‐art machine learning algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach can achieve an optimal high rate accuracy factor of 99.999, precision and recall factors of 100%, and an F1‐Score factor of 100% to detect unexpected cyber‐attacks for the V2V communications in the IoT environment.