I report on a critical analysis of the scenario of electroweak baryogenesis mediated by nonsuperconducting cosmic strings. This mechanism relies upon electroweak symmetry restoration in a region around cosmic strings, where sphalerons would be unsuppressed. I discuss the various problems this scenario has to face, presenting a careful computation of the sphaleron rates inside the strings, of the chemical potential for chiral number and of the efficiency of baryogenesis in different regimes of string networks. The conclusion is that the asymmetry in baryon number generated by this scenario is smaller than the observed value by at least 10 orders of magnitude.